About
When I was a high school junior, I spent many hours using the guidance office computers to explore college options—I just loved entering preferences and perusing possibilities. I was drawn to several beautiful, east-coast college campuses, but when my mom told me I could attend any school I could pay for, I knew my dream schools were out of reach: I was pretty sure I wouldn't qualify for need-based aid, which was all that these schools offered, and my parents weren't about to pay elite-school-sticker-price. When it was time to apply, I applied to the only private university I knew I could afford (BYU).
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Twenty+ years later (around 2014), when my oldest child started considering college options, I was more than happy to help (I still enjoy researching colleges). Just as I had wanted to leave my home state, he wanted to move far away for college. And, just as my parents weren't willing to pay what most private colleges cost, we too were constrained by budget. But I wanted my kids to have options. Thus, my search for affordable colleges began.
Choosing 100 schools
The 100 colleges and universities listed on this website have come to my attention through a variety of sources, over several years. I have consulted lists of "best-value" schools (e.g., Fiske, Princeton Review, U.S. News, Money, Forbes), popular rankings (e.g., U.S. News, Niche, College Simply, Princeton Review), and lists of schools that provide merit scholarships. Through years of researching schools for my kids, I have collected data on more than 175 schools.
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In building the list of 100 schools for this website, I started with no-loan and "free" schools. Then I sorted schools by net price and included the top schools for each income bracket (i.e., schools with the lowest net price for that income bracket) and the top schools overall (i.e., schools with the lowest overall net price). After removing duplicates, I had a list of 81 private colleges and universities. To get to 75, I sorted freshman debt figures (multiplying the percent of freshmen who borrowed by the average amount borrowed), and removed the 6 schools with the worst student debt. I could have removed another 20 schools with relatively high debt figures, but these schools have some of the lowest net prices for people in higher income brackets, and I wanted to include options for every income bracket, so I kept them.
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To identify 25 affordable public colleges and universities, I started with Michelle Kretzschmar's longer list of "Cheapest Out-of-State Colleges in 34 States." First, I selected schools with an out-of-state sticker price below $30,000 and a graduation rate of at least 50%. Next, I consulted a few rankings (U.S. News, Niche, and College Simply), and chose schools with higher rankings (a subjective process, as most of these schools aren't ranked by the latter two organizations, and U.S. News ranks schools by category—research universities, liberal arts colleges, and regional colleges—so I wasn't comparing apples to apples). Finally, to include more states in the list, I added a few schools with slightly higher costs. There are a number of similarly affordable state colleges and universities out there—see Michelle's list for more options—but I've tried to include some of the "best" (based on rankings and graduation rates) and most affordable (based on out-of-state sticker price).
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Rankings and net prices are blunt tools that change from year to year. I plan to update this list in a couple of years. If you have experience with a school that you think should be included on or removed from the list, please let me know (but first double check that the net price is below $30,000, or that the school has a "no-loan" financial aid policy).
