ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, August 16, 1996 TAG: 9608160080
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: Associated Press
The nation's best college values lie beyond the ivy-covered walls of Harvard, Yale and Princeton at more humble surroundings such as the College of New Jersey, Money magazine says.
Other relative unknowns such as the New College of the University of South Florida and Spelman College of Atlanta pepper the top 10 of Money's annual list of best college buys.
The financial magazine compiled 16 measures of educational quality for more than 1,000 schools - such as student-faculty ratio and entrance exam scores - and compared them with tuition and fees. The list appears in the magazine's September issue, which hits newsstands Monday.
California Institute of Technology was No. 1 this year despite its hefty $18,216 annual tuition. The school spends more than any other U.S. college on instruction - an average of $46,613 for each of its 923 students. Caltech also boasts a student-teacher ratio of 3-to-1.
New College, a liberal arts school in Sarasota with only 600 undergraduates, fell to second after topping the list three straight years. The school charges just $8,500 for out-of-state students, $2,066 for Floridians.
Texas' Rice University was third, followed by Missouri's Truman State University. College of New Jersey, which recently changed its name from Trenton State University to improve its image, was No. 5.
Rounding out the top 10: University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; Spelman, a predominantly black women's college; University of Texas-Austin; State University of New York at Binghamton; and St. Mary's College of Maryland.
Conspicuously low on the list, considering their lofty reputations, are Yale, 25; Harvard, 70; and Stanford, 78. Princeton and Columbia didn't even make the top 100.
``It's a very difficult thing to assess costs and value in higher education,'' said Harvard's director of public affairs, Alex Huppe. ``We have to look at how satisfied students are after they graduate. Students from Harvard have always expressed enormous satisfaction.''
Harvard, like the other Ivy League schools, had strong ratings for educational quality but was hurt by its $21,901 annual tuition and fees.
In a separate poll conducted for the issue, Money reported that 26 percent of parents with college-bound children in high school have not saved any money for their children's higher education. The poll, conducted by ICR Survey Research Group, had a margin of error of 4 percentage points.
The average amount saved by the 1,062 families questioned was $11,000 - roughly 13 percent of today's average cost for four years of college tuition, fees and room and board.
And if things aren't gloomy enough, Money cited an estimate from the financial planning firm College Money that by 2014, four years at an Ivy League university will cost about $460,000.
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: Chart by AP: The best education around.by CNB