Learning What You Pay For?

The chart below shows the top 30 colleges according to US News rankings and their respective tuition and fees. Schools below the linear regression are theoretically a better than average deal relative to the group, while those above the line might be supposed to be a worse than average deal. (This assumes a uniform distribution in quality, e.g. the difference between the first and second rank is the same as the difference between the second and third, etc.) Five of the top ranked schools are public: University of Michigan - Anne Arbor, University of Virginia, and the Los Angeles, Berkeley, and Santa Barbara campuses of the University of California. For these schools the out-of-state tuition rates were used. In some cases two or more colleges tied for a rank. It would appear that Princeton is the best deal at $56,010, while Tufts is the most overpriced of the group at $63,000.