WCU Is Among Money Magazine’s Top 175 Best Value Colleges In America

Press release from West Chester University:

Sept. 9, 2020

WCU Is Among Money Magazine’s Top 175 Best Value Colleges in America

This puts WCU in the top ten highest-ranked Pennsylvania institutions and the 175
best value colleges nationwide.

To find the schools that successfully combine quality and affordability, Money’s researchers
weighed 27 factors — comprising more than 20,000 data points, including tuition fees,
family borrowing, and career earnings — in three categories: quality of education,
affordability, and outcomes.

Each year, the researchers fine-tune their methodology. Considering the economic impact
of the pandemic, this year, they increased the emphasis on affordability. For the
2020 rankings, affordability accounts for 40% of the ranking, while the other two
categories account for 30% each.

Only institutions that met these requirements were evaluated: have at least 500 students;
have sufficient, reliable data to be analyzed; not be in financial distress; and have
a graduation rate that was at or above the median for its institutional category (public,
private, or historically black college or university), or have a high “value-added”
graduation rate (in other words, score in the top 25% of graduation rates after accounting
for the average test scores and percentage of low-income students among its enrollees).

The researchers made this caveat about standardized tests: “This spring, colleges
made a near-universal shift to ‘test-optional,’ by giving applicants the choice of
whether to submit SAT or ACT scores. In most cases, the changes were announced as
a temporary move as a result of the pandemic, and it’s unclear how many colleges will
stick with the policy. But even before this spring, an increasing number of colleges
were going test optional. If this continues to grow in popularity to where a large
minority of students at colleges in Money’s universe do not submit scores, we’ll have
to evaluate the effect that has on our rankings, particularly our value-add assessments
that rely heavily on scores to predict academic performance.”

Data sources used by Money were the U.S. Department of Education, Peterson’s, PayScale.com, and Money/American Institutes for Research calculations.

Read the full methodology here.

This press release was produced by West Chester University. The views expressed here are the author’s own.