For the fifth year, the University of North Georgia (UNG) has been named to Kiplinger’s Personal Finance national list of Best College Values. UNG is one of only four public universities in Georgia on the 2018 ranking, which reflects academic quality and affordability.
"UNG's continued inclusion on Kiplinger's Best College Values list is indicative of our affordability, but also our academic excellence," said UNG President Bonita Jacobs. "Together, these factors result in a truly exceptional educational opportunity."
UNG is ranked 94th on the list of best values in public colleges. The other public universities in Georgia on the list are University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, and Georgia State.
Kiplinger's quality measures include admission rate, percentage of students who return for sophomore year, student-faculty ratio, and four-year graduation rate. Cost criteria include tuition price, financial aid and average debt at graduation.
Introduced in 1998, Kiplinger's ranking is based on objective measurements of academic quality and affordability. In determining best values, Kiplinger started with data from nearly 1,200 public and private four-year schools, then narrowed the list based on measures of academic quality. Kiplinger then ranked each school using cost and financial aid measures. Quality criteria account for 55 percent of total points, and cost criteria 45 percent.
"Our rankings, which weigh affordability alongside academic quality, are a great resource for students and their parents when sorting through college choices," said Mark Solheim, editor of Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine. "We start with a universe of nearly 1,200 schools and trim the list using measures of academic quality. We then rank the schools based on cost and financial aid data."
The full rankings are now available online and will appear in print in the February 2018 issue of Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, on newsstands Jan. 9. A complete listing of Kiplinger's Best College Values for 2018 is available online.
In August, U.S. News & World Report ranked UNG No. 1 in the South for the least amount of student debt among regional public universities on its Student Debt Load at Graduation list. The data for that list includes loans taken out by students from their colleges, from private financial institutions and the government. The rankings are based primarily on data from 2016 and, for some factors, include averages of the previous two to four years of data.
In December, UNG was also identified by Best Value Schools.com as one of the most affordable universities in America in its recent ranking. UNG was one of only three Georgia universities on that list as well.