College Rankings Part 4: The Success of Public Schools
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This is Your Money Matters from The Wall Street Journal. Welcome to Your Money Matters. I'm J.R. Whalen in New York. In part four of our look at The Wall Street Journal Times Higher Education College Rankings, we focus in on smaller institutions in the world of higher education, state schools and public universities. Think they can't play with the big boys in the rankings? Think again. Wall Street Journal higher education reporter Melissa Korn joins us with details. So Melissa, state schools often lack the support and attractive teacher to student ratio that private schools and larger universities have, yet they appear more and more in college rankings.
So public universities are a fantastic educational option for many students, many families, just because their coffers aren't quite as full as the likes of Harvard and Yale doesn't mean they're bad places to go. So they do have more limited funding. They are state-backed schools, but often only get a few percent of their overall budgets from the states these days, which means they have As you said, they have larger student-faculty ratios, so you'll have bigger classes.
How do public universities compare to private colleges in the WSJ/THE rankings?
Some schools, it is hard to get through in four years just because of overcrowding or things like that. They have great outcomes. A lot of these schools – so a lot of the public universities that are in the top 100 for the Wall Street Journal Times higher ed ranking outperform their counterparts of private universities, private colleges in terms of student outcomes.
And it's a great point you make that high spending doesn't necessarily translate to a strong education.
Right. I mean, in the business world, we commend companies for being efficient. We commend the government when it's efficient. And you can say the same thing about these colleges. Just because a school is throwing a ton of money at its academic infrastructure doesn't mean it's better at it. So a lot of public universities have had to be really creative in finding ways of doing more online or hybrid programs, more digital tools, more distance education in some ways to be able to deliver a really good product at a lower price.
So tell me about the significance of the University of Florida. You call that out in your story.
Yeah, so they struck me as a school that, you know, they do quite well. They're in the top 60 overall. But they really punched above their weight in terms of graduate outcomes. And that looks at things like graduation rate as well as student loan default rates. And one of the reasons for that and for a lot of public universities doing pretty well on that is they don't cost as much. Students don't have to take out as much money. So they're not in as much debt when they graduate. And then they can take jobs and pay off their loans in a reasonable way rather than having, you know, 40, 50, $60,000 of loans. They have 10, 20, 30,000 at some of these schools.
And being able to show that they score well on student loan default rates, that's got to be very attractive to a segment of the population that might otherwise not be able to afford to go to school or go to school for four years.
Right. It's acknowledging not only will you be able to get a job out of school, but you will be able to get a job and pay back your loans and actually have a decent quality of life as a result of that.
We're speaking with The Wall Street Journal's Melissa Korn about The Wall Street Journal Times Higher Education College Rankings. And you're listening to Your Money Matters here at The Wall Street Journal. Thanks for listening, everybody. So, Melissa, what do you think the larger private institutions are learning from the smaller public universities and state schools about what they're doing right and how they are showing up higher and higher in the college rankings?
I think private universities are taking away from public schools that you need to be innovative. You need to be trying new things and creative. And there are a ton of large public universities that are really cash-strapped that are doing some incredible things in terms of student retention and getting graduation rates up in four-year graduation rates, let alone six-year graduation rates.
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