Salve Regina included in Money magazine’s “Best Colleges” report

Salve Regina has been ranked among the top 7 percent of the 2,400 higher education institutions nationwide that were surveyed by Money magazine for its 2017 “Best Colleges for Your Money” analysis.

Among the metrics examined by Money in ranking Salve Regina 160th overall and second in Rhode Island were actual cost of attendance and return on investment in terms of early career salaries.

Money ranks colleges based on 27 measures of educational quality, affordability and alumni success. In each category, researchers use at least one “value-added” measure, which reveals a school’s performance after subtracting the impact of its average student’s test scores and percentage of low-income students.

“We estimate a college’s ‘value-add’ by calculating its performance on important measures such as graduation rates, student loan repayment and default rates, and post-graduation earnings, after adjusting for the types of students it admits,” writes Money magazine’s Kim Clark. “We believe this analysis gives students and parents a much better indication of which colleges will provide real value for their tuition dollars.”

In building its rankings, Money focused on the three basic factors that surveys show are the most important to parents and students: quality of education, affordability and outcomes.