America’s Best Bang for the Buck Colleges

Higher education is under a level of scrutiny that the industry has not seen in our lifetimes. The Trump administration’s efforts to take a blowtorch to the U.S. Department of Education and Ivy League institutions are unprecedented, but state governments, foundations, and the general public are demanding that colleges and universities do more to help students complete a quality education with a promising career outlook at a reasonable price tag. And for more than a decade, the Monthly has produced an annual list of Best Bang for the Buck colleges that foster social mobility and serve the public good. We do so again in 2025 to highlight that many colleges are excelling in this key area—but others are failing students and taxpayers in major ways. The rankings are broken down by region, available here. (We used the same data and methodology to create the social mobility portion of the main rankings, Best Colleges for Your Tuition and Tax Dollars; the methodology is explained here.) 

The key takeaway of the rankings is that public higher education systems in some states are engines of social mobility at an affordable price tag. The California State University system occupies nine of the top 11 spots in the West, interrupted only by super-wealthy Stanford University and church-supported Brigham Young University. The City University of New York system placed six colleges in the Northeast top 11, while Columbia, Yale, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins were relegated to spots 12 through 15. 

Public universities in Florida, led by Florida International University and the University of Central Florida, held seven of the top nine positions in the Southeast Best Bang for the Buck Ranking in 2025. Florida higher education is facing substantial leadership questions, but the system has been rock-solid in the past. The University of Texas’s Rio Grande Valley and El Paso campuses were in second and third place in the South, while the University of Illinois Chicago was tops in the Midwest. Regionally focused public universities generally perform well on this list due to their combination of broad access, relatively low tuition, and strong student outcomes. 

There are also a number of access-oriented private nonprofit colleges that performed well on our Best Bang for the Buck Rankings. Berea College in Kentucky maintained its position atop the South, Boricua College was third in the Northeast, and the College of the Ozarks was second in the Midwest. All three of these colleges focus on serving students from lower-income families, and do so well. Some institutions that are currently wealthy (although that may change quickly given actions from the Trump administration and Congress) also perform well for the modest number of lower-income students that they serve. MIT, Princeton, Duke, Rice, Northwestern, and the University of Chicago all finished within the top five in their respective regions. This shows that there are multiple ways to be a Best Bang for the Buck college.

The bottom of each list is dominated by expensive private colleges—both nonprofit and for-profit—that have mediocre completion rates given their student bodies, enroll relatively few Pell recipients, and feature yawning gaps in graduation rates between Pell Grant recipients and non-Pell students. These colleges may deliver value for some students, but individuals should approach these institutions with caution and ask a lot of questions about whether a particular college is right for them. 

Finally, the rapid unscheduled disassembly of the Department of Education’s data infrastructure calls the future of these rankings into question. We are hopeful that logic (or lawsuits) will prevail and that the department will be able to continue producing data to inform students, their families, and the general public. But if not, students are going to have limited information when making one of the largest financial decisions of their lifetimes.