UCLA ranked No. 5 among U.S. public colleges and universities in the Kiplinger’s Personal Finance 2014 survey of the best values in higher education.
UCLA Newsroom: The magazine’s report, “Best Values in Public Colleges,” ranks schools based on factors related to academic quality and affordability, including student-to-faculty ratio, graduation rate, test scores of incoming freshmen, tuition rates and availability of financial aid.
Kiplinger’s noted that more than 80 percent of UCLA students qualify for financial, aid and UCLA’s $28,852 total yearly in-state cost is reduced to an average of $11,483 for students receiving need-based aid. Additionally, the report praised the campus’s breadth of opportunities: “UCLA offers more than 800 clubs and student organizations, plus 125 majors. Its location in a major city gives students the internship and work opportunities that a small college town can’t.”
Joining UCLA in the top 10 was UC Berkeley (No. 9). Six other University of California campuses were among the top 100: UC San Diego (14), UC Santa Barbara (18), UC Irvine (23), UC Davis (36), UC Santa Cruz (52) and UC Riverside (99). Several California State universities also made the top 100 list. For the third year in a row, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ranked No. 1. See the full list of the 100 best-value public colleges and universities.
UCLA ranked sixth in 2012 and ninth in 2011 in the Kiplinger report.
Regardless of methodology, UCLA consistently performs well in a wide variety of rankings. For example, the campus placed No. 23 in the latest U.S. News & World Report’s survey of the nation’s top colleges and universities and No. 10 among national universities in the most recent Washington Monthly magazine rankings, which measure how universities serve the public interest.
In addition, UCLA placed second among U.S. public universities — and No. 12 internationally — in the newest Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Academic Ranking of World Universities, which evaluated more than 1,000 institutions on factors such as faculty publications and research citations and the number of alumni and faculty who have won Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals.
