Tuition, room, and board at a four-year college will cost you, on average, $21,000 to $48,000 per year in the US—so you definitely want to make sure you're getting a good value for your money. On that note, WalletHub is out with its annual ranking of the best colleges and universities in the country. It analyzed more than 1,000 public and private institutions of higher education across the country on 33 measures including cost, student loan debt, class size, student-faculty ratio, on-campus crime, diversity, housing, graduation rate, and a number of metrics related to employment, earnings, and debt post-graduation. The site used the information to determine, as it says, "the top-performing schools at the lowest possible costs to undergraduates." Read on for the top 10 for 2020:
The top 10:
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Harvard University
- Princeton University
- Yale University
- Stanford University
- California Institute of Technology
- Duke University
- University of Pennsylvania
- Northwestern University
- University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
A couple other notable No. 1s: New Mexico State University's main campus had the lowest student loan debt while California Institute of Technology had the lowest student-loan default rate. MIT had the highest return on educational investment
and the highest post-attendance median salary. Need to know where your alma mater ranks? You can search the full list
here. (More
colleges and universities stories.)