Money magazine has named Montana Tech the 23rd best public school and the 66th overall in its inaugural value ranking of U.S. colleges and universities. Money magazine awarded Montana Tech a value grade of “B+.”
Money magazine’s list of Best Colleges is a new approach to ranking colleges that uses unique measures of educational quality, affordability, and career outcomes to help families find the right school at the right price.
“We are thrilled to be listed by Money magazine as a top school,” explained Montana Tech Chancellor Donald M. Blackketter. “This new ranking reaffirms that Montana Tech continues to provide a quality education at a great value. Our placement rate of over 90% is evidence of the quality in all our programs including our focused programs in science, technology, engineering and math.”
In addition to the Best Colleges ranking, Montana Tech was also recognized on the Money magazine list of the “25 Best Colleges That You Can Actually Get Into,” placing at No. 5. The “25 Best Colleges That You Can Actually Get Into” includes top-ranked schools that accept at least 50% of applicants and where the typical student had a B average in high school.
Nine months in the making, Money’s Best Colleges ranked 665 schools on 17 measures, based on the most recent research about what really matters in higher education. Among its distinctive analyses: The list provides a more realistic way to price colleges, taking into account the complete cost of a degree rather than a single year. It is also the only ranking to evaluate which schools add the most value given the academic and economic background of the students who attend, and to level the playing field on majors, to show whether graduates of a particular college earn more (or less) than average, whether they got degrees in engineering or English. The result, says Money senior writer Kim Clark, who created the rankings and wrote the accompanying story, ‘is a list of colleges – some famous, some surprising – that, according to the best data available, provide real value. College is expensive, but the highly rated colleges on our list are the most likely to do a great job of educating your student and helping to launch him or her into a well-paying job.’”
To develop the new rankings, Money partnered with Mark Schneider, former commissioner of the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics and his company College Measures, which collects and analyzes data to drive improvements in higher ed. Major contributions also came from Payscale, which provided the earnings data. One of the most important findings to come out of the rankings, Schneider notes, is that you don’t have to pay a lot to get a high quality education that really helps in the job market. ‘The published price of a college doesn’t tell you very much about what you’ll actually pay or of students’ later life success,’ he says. ‘There is zero correlation with most of our measures.’”
The top five best-value schools in Money’s ranking were Babson College in Wellesley, Mass.; the Webb Institute in Glen Cove, N.Y.; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.; Princeton University in Princeton, N.J., and Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. Harvard University in Cambridge ranked sixth.