Money magazine included Fresno Pacific University in the top third of its list of Best Colleges in America, at number 209 of 727.
To qualify, schools must:
- Have at least 500 students.
- Have sufficient, reliable data to be analyzed.
- Not be in financial distress.
- Have a graduation rate at or above the median for its institutional category.
Categories are:
Quality of education
- Six-year graduation rate.
- Value-added graduation rate as the difference between a school’s actual graduation rate and its expected rate, based on the economic and academic profile of the student body.
- Peer quality based on standardized test scores of entering freshman and the percentage of accepted students who enroll.
- Instructor quality as measured by the student-to-faculty ratio.
- Financial difficulties.
- Pell Grant recipient outcomes based on how many Pell Grant recipients a school graduates.
Affordability
- Net price of a degree after financial aid.
- Student debt rate.
- Student loan repayment rate.
- Value-added student loan repayment—rates after adjusting for the economic and academic profile of the student body.
- Affordability for low-income students.
Outcomes
- Earnings by alumni to PayScale.com.
- Earnings adjusted by majors as measured by whether students earn more or less than would be expected given what they study.
- College Scorecard 10-year earnings.
- Value-added earnings based on if a school helps launch students to better-paying jobs than competitors whose students have similar academic and economic backgrounds.
- College Scorecard employment outcomes.
- Job meaning, using the average score of alumni to PayScale.com’s survey question: “Does your work make the world a better place?”
- Socio-economic mobility index, or percentage of students each school moves from low-income backgrounds to upper-middle-class jobs by the time the students reach their mid-30s.
The list was published August 13, 2018. More at time.com/money/best-colleges/