Rice ranked No. 5 best value by Kiplinger

CONTACT: B.J. Almond
PHONE: 713-348-6770
E-MAIL: balmond@rice.edu

Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine ranks Rice University No. 5 on its 2008 list of best values among private colleges and universities.

The new ranking, published in the April issue, is based on academic quality and affordability, with quality accounting for two-thirds of the appraisal.

The quality metric incorporates such measures as Rice’s student-faculty ratio (5:1), the percentage of applicants offered admission (24), the percentage of freshmen who earned a bachelor’s degree within four years or five years (76 and 89, respectively), and the percentage of the 2006-07 freshman class who scored 600 or higher on the verbal and math components of the SAT (89), or 24 or higher on the ACT (94).

The affordability metric incorporates the total cost for the academic year 2007-08, including tuition, fees, books, and room and board ($39,955), cost after need-based aid ($23,084), percentage of the average aid package that came from grants or scholarships (77), cost after non-need-based aid ($35,600), percentage of undergraduates who received non-need-based aid (31) and average debt at graduation owed by graduates who took out education loans ($15,873).

“We believe that Rice offers the best undergraduate educational experience in America, including the opportunity to work with some of the top researchers in the world,” said President David Leebron. “But our institution is measured equally by the opportunity we create for students from all economic backgrounds.  Thus access and affordability remain among our top priorities. We are gratified that this combination of extraordinary educational quality and opportunity continues to be recognized by the Kiplinger ranking.”

Rice tuition is about $6,000 per year lower than tuition at its private peer institutions. Because the new Kiplinger ranking is based on the 2007-08 school year, it does not take into account the fact that Rice recently eliminated loan requirements for students from families with incomes under $60,000 — double the previous no-loan threshold.

The top four spots on Kiplinger’s new ranking are held by Caltech, Yale, Princeton and MIT. Rounding out the top 10 with Rice are Harvard, Dartmouth, Duke, Emory and the University of Pennsylvania. Last year Rice was No. 4 on Kiplinger’s list.

Rice is ranked as the No. 1 best value among private college in the 2008 edition of the Princeton Review’s “America’s Best-Value Colleges.”