Clips

Each year we rank roughly 850 bachelor’s and master’s institutions, as well. Many, like Elizabeth City State University, a historically Black college in North Carolina that ranks second among bachelor’s-granting schools, go unheralded by the prestige measurers even as they quietly graduate thousands of underprivileged students into well-paying jobs. Since 2021, ECSU has climbed 11 places thanks to its incredibly low cost to students and its efforts to enroll Pell recipients and keep them in school, which it does at a rate only 5 percent below the mean. SUNY Geneseo tops our master’s list, ahead of no fewer than seven Cal State campuses in the top 11. The Finger Lakes–area school excels in our research and service metrics, sending an extraordinary number of students on to doctoral degrees and the Peace Corps. Meanwhile, Cal State Northridge, the third-ranked master’s school, graduates more Pell recipients each year—3,779—than the entire Ivy League combined, and charges them about what Cornell and Dartmouth do, while splitting its $203.5 million endowment among 36,000 students and somehow also managing to rank eighth in research spending among its peers. Near the bottom is DeVry University in Ontario. This California campus of the for-profit chain charges an arm and a leg to low-income students—$28,207 a year—who go on to underperform their peers’ incomes by nearly 25 percent, a significant problem with all that tuition to pay off. -- Washington Monthly