Louisville, Ky., – It’s no secret going to college can be outrageously expensive. That leads a majority of students to rely on banks and other loan institutions for the dreaded student loans.
Naturally, college kids want to go where they can get “the most bang for their buck” and graduate into a career that pays a salary high enough to pay off that debt and avoid eating mac-and-cheese for decades. SmartAsset, a New York financial technology company, has conducted a recent study ranking the nation’s best value schools.
Broken down by state, the University of Louisville comes in third behind Western Kentucky University and the University of Kentucky.
Here is SmartAsset’s explanation of its study methodology:
SmartAsset looked at five factors to determine the best value colleges and universities: tuition, student living costs, scholarship and grant offerings, retention rate and starting salary.
To capture the true cost of attending a school, we included the tuition (using in-state tuition for public schools where applicable), student living costs (including room and board, books, supplies, transportation and other personal expenses) and the average scholarships and grants offered to students of the school.
To capture what students get in return, we looked at student retention rate (the percent of students that re-enrolled at the institution the following year) and the average starting salary.
We weighted each of the five factors equally to come up with a ranking of schools in our analysis. With that ranking, we created an index (a sort of grading on a curve) where the number one school was assigned 100.
Sources: 2013 National Center for Educational Statistics, 2014 Payscale, 2013 College InSight
SmartAsset has also published a national interactive map to showcase schools across the country. You can checkout the map and more information here on their website.
