Rice University, a century-old Texas school known for top-flight engineering and science programs, heads a list of the nation's 100 best college buys in a magazine survey.
Money Magazine's second annual Money Guide called the Houston university the nation's best overall tuition value after analyzing 1,011 colleges and universities.The Top 100 list had 56 private schools, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale, Stanford and the University of Chicago, which charge more than $16,000 in tuition.
Rice, with a $1 billion endowment, charges its 3,900 students $7,700 in tuition plus $4,900 in room and board.
On the cost side, the survey rated schools based on tuition. It used out-of-state charges for public schools to make them more comparable to private institutions.
In measuring educational quality, the survey used such indicators as student-to-faculty ratio, average SAT scores, library quality, graduation rates, percentage of graduates who earn doctorates, and the number of graduates who make Standard & Poor's survey of 70,000 top corporate executives.
The other schools in this year's top 10 best buys were: New College of The University of South Florida, Sarasota; Trenton State College, Trenton, N.J.; University of Virginia, Charlottesville; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; California Institute of Technology, Pasadena; State University of New York at Binghamton; University of Washington, Seattle; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and the University of Texas at Austin.