50 College Gems With Bargain Tuitions, SAT Optional Policies And Openings

From: http://www.forbes.com/sites/schifrin/2015/05/27/50-college-gems-with-bargain-tuitions-sat-optional-policies-and-openings/

It’s been about a month since the deadline passed for Class of 2019 freshman to submit deposits securing a space at colleges they have been admitted to. Yet nearly 350 colleges have reported to the National Association of College Admissions Counselors that they are still accepting freshman and transfer applications because their pool of prospective applicants wasn’t adequate enough to fill all of their open class seats.

You can blame this annual phenomenon on the glut of institutions of higher education that continue to subsist, thanks to largely to government subsidies, easy credit and aggressive enrollment consultants.  Regardless, with some careful research you will find that among these needy colleges are educational gems, that, because of factors often out of their control — like location (rural schools are hard sell for most teens) or niche (gender-specific colleges are less popular) they can’t seem to drum up enough viable prospects. In a few rare cases the student shortfall has to do with their choosing to spend more on educational costs—like faculty salaries—than on things like direct marketing or lavish campus perks.
As Forbes has done for the last two years we’ve taken this list of 345 “space available” colleges and cross referenced it with Princeton Review’s listing of The Best 379 Colleges 2015 Edition. The result is the table below which contains 50 of excellent colleges ranked by reported SAT scores as a reference for intellectual rigor. You will note that the vast majority of these colleges are extremely generous with institutional grants, otherwise known as tuition discounts.
This year’s top school is St. John’s College, founded in 1696 first as a preparatory school for colonial Virginia’s College of William & Mary. Later in 1784, thanks to backing from four signers of the Declaration of Independence, it received its college charter.   Today St. John’s actually has two campuses for students to choose from, one in Annapolis, Maryland and the other in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Like Brown University and Sarah Lawrence College, St. John’s is a school for self-directed intellectuals who don’t want to be fenced in by rigid core curriculums or vocational style pre-professional roadmaps. There are no tests, majors or minors, electives or textbooks. The college’s rigorous interdisciplinary course of study revolves around reading, discussing and writing papers based on the Great Books of Western Civilization in areas ranging from literature, philosophy and politics to mathematics, science and music.
In some ways St. John’s approach is a throwback to the way elite colleges approached learning  a century ago and the way higher education still exists to an extent at universities like Oxford and Cambridge. Over four years, students and their faculty “tutors” discuss, seminar-style, the works of more than 150 greats, from Homer, Pascal and Adam Smith, to Tolstoy, Mozart, Twain and Einstein [see full list]. Says the schools promotional video, “There are no departments in the human mind…we ask poets here to study mathematics and we ask physicists to learn music and philosophy.” Despite its name, St. John’s is non-denominational, SAT optional, and offers generous grants to 70 to 80% of its incoming freshman, cutting listed tuition and housing costs, on average by $25,000 to $30,000 per year.

Indeed there are many test optional liberal arts colleges still looking for freshman for the fall. Wheaton College in Norton, Mass reports that it gives discounts to 91% of its incoming freshman, with an average grant of more than $23,000. Wheaton has an 11 to 1 student faculty ratio and 47 majors ranging from Theater and Dance, to Physics and Russian Studies. Norton is rural, but the campus is located an hour away from two urban collegiate hotbeds, Boston and Providence. Recent claim to fame: freshly minted American Idol winner Nick Fradiani is an alum who graduated in 2008 with a degree in history.

Other excellent SAT optional schools on the list include Washington & Jefferson College in Washington PA,  Juniata College in Huntingdon, PA, Knox College, located about an hour west of Peoria, Illinois and Green Mountain College, nestled in Vermont’s ski country.  Vermont neighbor Marlboro College, located halfway between Bennington and Brattleboro, is a school that tends to rank high on all of the “alternative” college listings.  With 300 undergraduates, think tiny classes, an emphasis on developing writing skills, one-on-one tutorials with professors and  a quirky, intelligent self-directed student body.

It is no surprise that some of the larger public schools, often with rolling admissions, still have plenty of space. Among them are the Universities of  Oregon, Arizona, Maine, Idaho, South Dakota, West Virginia University, New Jersey Institute of Technology and Washington State University. These lower cost public universities tend to have “all-in” list prices between $20,000 and $30,000 per year. Still, they feel compelled to offer discounts to the majority of freshman enrolling. For those getting rebates, the average tends to range from $2,000 to $8500 per student per year.  By contrast, most of the private-not-for profits on the list offer freshman discounts of up to $30,000 per year deducted from higher stated tuition prices.

Despite several excellent  urban options including University of San Diego,  Baltimore’s Goucher College , Oakland’s Mills College and the University of San Francisco, you will find that a common theme running through the list of institutions still desperately seeking applicants and offering steep tuition discounts, is that many suffer from what 18 year old’s might describe as being “in the middle of nowhere.”  For many high school teens  potential off-campus activities including nightlife and internships weigh more heavily than the actual quality of education. It also stands to reason that universities set in thriving cities have an easier time attracting the best professors.

The one exception to the “middle of nowhere” problem in 2015 was Baltimore, Maryland. The civil unrest and rioting that erupted in the city in the aftermath of the killing of Freddie Gray occurred in late April,  just as high school teens were getting ready to send in their deposit checks. This probably affected Goucher’s enrollment, as  well as that of University of Maryland,  Baltimore campus and Loyola University. Still, Johns Hopkins University, took in a record number of applicants this year and admitted only 12%.  It will be interesting to see if Hopkins admissions yield (the percentage of accepted students that actually enroll) falls from its recent 37% level and whether this elite institution will need to change enrollment strategies given Baltimore’s higher profile, among high crime cities.

COLLEGE/LOCATION	NUMBER OF UNDERGRADS	PERCENT GETTING GRANTS	MIDPOINT SAT 1600
St. John’s College/Annapolis, MD	457	72%	1280*
St. John’s College/Santa Fe, NM	383	81	1275*
University of Fla.**/Gainesville, FL	35,895	32	1265
University of Tulsa/Tulsa, OK	3,488	87	1265
Marlboro College/Marlboro, VT	302	94	1230*
Michigan Technological Univ/Houghton, MI	5,942	92	1215
St. Mary’s College/St. Mary’s City, MD	2,034	58	1215
U of San Diego/San Diego, CA	5,905	72	1215

Knox College/Galesburg, IL	1,458	94	1213*
U of Maryland-Balt./Balt., MD	12,684	50	1210
Truman State/Kirksville, MO	6,200	98	1205
DePauw U/Greencastle, IN	2,366	96	1200
Saint Louis U/St. Louis, MO	14,877	88	1200
Washington & Jefferson/Wash. PA	1,466	100	1195*
Penn State U/State College, PA	41,535	32	1195
Wheaton College/Norton, MA	1,639	91	1194*
Loyola Maryland/Balt., MD	4,008	65	1184*
Juniata College/Huntingdon, PA	1,693	100	1183*

U of San Francisco/SF., CA	7,118	65	1170
Goucher College/Balt., MD	1,538	88	1165*
Hofstra Univ/Hempstead, NY	7,587	92	1165*
William Jewell Col/Liberty, MO	1,148	100	1162*
Wagner College/Staten Island, NY	1,839	99	1160
Ripon College/Ripon, WI	953	95	1155
Mills College/Oakland, CA	1,022	99	1145
Loyola U New Orleans/NO. LA	3,553	97	1140
NJ Inst of Tech/Newark, NJ	8,127	47	1140
Wittenberg U/Springfield, OH	1,971	98	1140*

Lake Forest Col/Lake Forest, IL	1,620	99	1130*
U of Redlands/Redlands, CA	3,939	93	1130
Eckerd College/St. Petersberg, FL	2,653	95	1120
Ohio Wesleyan/Delaware OH	1,865	99	1120*
Univ of Arizona/Tucson, AZ	34,144	72	1107*
Drew University/Madison, NJ	1,878	96	1105*
Alfred University/Alfred, NY	2,020	100	1100
University of Maine/Orono, ME	9,893	71	1085
Bellarmine Univ/Louisville, KY	2,970	100	1080

Evergreen State/Olympia, WA	5,189	73	1080
Le Moyne College/Syracuse, NY	3,074	100	1075
University of Idaho/Moscow, ID	11,534	65	1070
Guilford College/Greensboro, NC	2,764	91	1065*
Rider Univ/Lawrenceville, NJ	4,967	97	1040
Green Mountain Col/Poultney, VT	672	96	1035*
West Virginia U/Morgantown, WV	24,670	60	1035
Westminster Col/New Wilmington, PA	2,710	100	1035
Washington State U/Pullman, WA	25,835	49	1030

Virginia Wesleyan/Norfolk, VA	1,589	97	1026*
U of South Dakota/Vermillion, SD	9,977	62	990
Catawba College/Salisbury, NC	1,325	97	985*
Angelo State U/San Angelo, TX	7,851	51	960

All data derived from IPEDS database, college websites, collegedata.com. *Has a test (SAT/ACT) optional policy. ** Only accepting transfer students.