Contact: Kenneth Billings
STARKVILLE, Miss.--Mississippi State University moves up four spots among the "100 Best Values in Public Colleges" in the latest edition of Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine.
Now listed at 83rd, the 130-year-old land-grant university is the only Mississippi institution included in a feature story of the personal finance magazine's December issue.
Now in its sixth decade, the monthly publication annually provides the ranking based on its assessment of more than 500 schools. According to the editors, greater emphasis is placed on academic quality.
"In our scoring system, academic quality carries more weight than costs (almost two-thirds of the total)," they explain in the introduction.
Kiplinger's calculates that MSU's total cost for in-state students is $13,484, or $8,798 after taking into account financial aid. (The complete report is available at www.kiplinger.com/money/collegevalues/.)
In compiling its figures, the popular magazine considers academic measures that include, among others, freshman ACT scores and admission rates, freshman retention rates, student-faculty ratios, and four- and six-year graduation rates.
Measures of cost included total and average costs, as well as average percentage of need met by financial aid.
For more information about Mississippi State University, see http://www.msstate.edu/.