When it comes to the best bang for your educational buck, no school in Texas tops Texas A&M.
Kiplinger’s personal finance magazine has A&M listed at #21 among the nation’s top 100 public colleges for best values.
The ranking shows continued improvement for A&M, which came in #30 in 2009-10, and #23 last year.
Only two other Texas universities made the list: UT-Austin and UT-Dallas. North Carolina-Chapel Hill came in at number one.
More information below provided by Texas A&M University:
Texas A&M University continues to move up in Kiplinger’s annual listing of “best values” among the nation’s top 100 public colleges, now ranking 21st — and tops in Texas.
The widely circulated personal finance magazine has just released its 2011-12 rankings, which are based on a combination of academic quality and affordability, note the publication’s editors.
Texas A&M ranked 23rd on Kiplinger’s “best values” public college list last year and 30th the previous year. It is one of only three Texas universities to be included on that list this year, followed by the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Texas at Dallas.
The 2011-12 public college list is again headed by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The Kiplinger’s rankings are the latest in a host of such assessments in which Texas A&M fares well, university officials note. Last month, for example, a new online organization, TheBestColleges.org, ranked Texas A&M sixth nationally among public universities and first in Texas, basing its ratings on weighted factors that focus on economic value, quality of life, academic quality and student satisfaction. The university also historically ranks high in national ratings by such publications as U.S. News & World Report, Forbes, Washington Monthly and Princeton Review.
Additionally, the university fared well in a recent New York Times listing of what business leaders worldwide say are the top institutions from which they recruit, with Texas A&M placing eighth among public U. S. universities and first among all public or private universities in the Southwest or deep South. It also ranked second nationally in a Wall Street Journal study in which large U.S. companies, non-profits and governmental agencies rated schools on the basis of whose graduates were best prepared and most able to succeed. Smart Money magazine placed Texas A&M first nationally for “payback ratio” — the earning levels of an institution’s graduates compared to what they paid in tuition, fees and related costs for their undergraduate educations.
In a related study last year, Texas A&M ranked first among public universities in Texas in “return on investment” (ROI) — what a graduate earns compared to typical college costs incurred, according to listings posted online by PayScale, Inc. In another PayScale posting, Texas A&M ranked first among public institutions in Texas in earnings of graduates at the midpoint of their careers.