The Kiplinger Rankings are Out


Kiplinger has produced its 2009-2010 ranking of US universities. This is very much a student consumer ranking that measures the value for money delivered by each institution. It is based on information about student debt, tuition costs, financial aid, gender ratio, class size and average SAT scores, among others.

There is no doubt a lot of room for argument about the validity of the data and how the indicators were weighted but this sort of index does seem very useful.

I am wondering if something like this can be incorporated into existing international rankings. A lot of Kiplingers's data would be difficult or impossible to obtain outside the US but information about things like tuition fees, gender ratio, class size, and number of books in the library is widely available.

The top five private universities are:

1. Caltech
2. Princeton
3. Yale
4. Rice
5. Harvard

The top five public schools (for out-of-state students) are:

1. SUNY Binghamton
2. SUNY College at Geneseo
3. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
4. University of Florida
5. College of New Jersey