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Sept. 6, 2002--Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine has ranked the University of Delaware 14th among its 100 best values in public colleges. The move is 10 spots higher on the Kiplinger scale than UD’s ranking of 24 two years ago.
The magazine lauds UD’s ability to hold down costs at a time when state colleges and universities across the country are raising rates in response to the sluggish economy, the faltering stock market and increased costs in energy and health care.
In writing about colleges and universities that ranked high, Kiplinger’s said, “On the other side of the country [from the University of California at Berkeley] sits the University of Delaware, which has moved up 10 spots to number 14 since our last survey two years ago. In-state students pay only $5,070 in tuition and fees, $14,752 when room and board and other expenses are added in. Out-of-state students pay $24,852.”
“I think I’m getting a steal,” the magazine quotes Brandon Williams, 22, a journalism major from Bear, as saying.
“Knowing how to sniff out a good deal is jut one sign of how sharp the students heading to these campuses are,” the magazine says.
The magazine continues, “The University of Delaware is no slouch, either. The school has produced four Rhodes Scholars in the past 10 years, including Len Stark, who’s now assistant U.S. attorney in Wilmington. “
“I fell in love with the place my first semester there. The University of Delaware has everything that places like Duke or the University of Pennsylvania have–except the name and the price tag,” the magazine quotes Stark, who earned dual bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UD in 1991 before heading off to Oxford University and Yale Law School.
In another category of the Kiplinger report, UD is listed 10th among school offering small class size and a student/teacher ratio of 13 or less.
“A small class size can often mean more attention from the professor—for better or for worse,” the magazine says.
“The University of Delaware is highly competitive when either cost or quality is the issue,” says UD President David P. Roselle. “When they are combined, as is the case in the Kiplinger rankings, we would fully expect to be among the top few institutions in the nation. Moreover, since these rankings are in part based on student achievement, and since each entering class at our institution has a higher academic profile, we are confident that future rankings will be still higher."
Kiplinger’s exclusive survey includes more than 500 U.S. public colleges and universities. Winners are determined by application of the magazine’s own formulas to data supplied by the school themselves. After collecting data from Wintergreen-Orchard House and the U.S. Department of Education and its own reporting, the magazine narrows the list to the 200 most selective universities, based on the entrance-exam scores of the 2001 freshman class.
To whittle the list to the final 100, the magazine considers additional measures of quality, including how many freshmen returned for their sophomore year, four-and six-year graduation rates, student-faculty ratios, how much a college spends on each student for instruction and how much it spends maintaining libraries. The final 100 are ranked on a combination of quality and cost.
“Kiplinger’s confirms what the marketplace has been telling us for several years now,” says Fred Siegel, associate provost for enrollment services. “We provide the best undergraduate education for the tuition dollar on the East Coast. Few flagship, state-assisted institutions make the undergraduate student the top educational priority, and none has an undergraduate student body comprising over 80 percent of the total population. The rich resources of UD are unmatched as they influence the growth of undergraduate students.”
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