by Steven Felschundneff | steven@claremont-courier.com

Harvey Mudd College has landed on another list of schools providing the best value for one’s education dollar.

The financial advice and technology company SmartAsset ranked Harvey Mudd fourth nationwide in its 2021 Best Value College study and third in the state of California.

SmartAsset looked at five factors to determine the best value colleges and universities in the nation: tuition, student living costs, scholarship and grant offerings, student retention rate and starting salary for new graduates.

The company compared factors that illustrate a student’s return on investment including retention rate and average starting salary of new graduates when they enter the workforce.

Tuition and student living costs—room and board, books, supplies, transportation—were used to capture the costs associated with attending each school. Scholarships and grants show the amount of financial backing colleges are endowing to their student body on a per-person basis.

“We gave 25 percent weighting to starting salary, tuition and living costs. We then gave 12.5 percent weighting to scholarships and grants, as well as retention rate, to come up with our Best Value Colleges Index. Schools were ranked in accordance with their score on the index, with the number one school receiving a score of 100 and each additional school’s index value representing how closely they compare,” the company wrote in a news release.

The top ten colleges and universities include Massachusetts Institute of Technology, California Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Harvey Mudd College, Georgia Institute of Technology, Princeton University, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Colorado School of Mines, Missouri University of Science and Technology and Carnegie Mellon University.

Anyone who has spent five minutes researching colleges online has undoubtedly seen dozens of lists that rank schools, and Harvey Mudd and the other Claremont Colleges routinely make the cut. On its website, Harvey Mudd reports 19 such rankings, including first from the Princeton Review for best career placement and first from PayScale for both highest mid-career salaries and best schools for return on investment.

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