4) Cost of attendance: To calculate a school’s Cost of Attendance score, we looked at both overall cost and a normalized construction of overall cost of attendance. We assumed here that lower tuition was preferable, and feel that we ought to acknowledge the important caveat that we only considered the base price of a university, while in actual practice, grants, scholarships, opportunity costs, and even residency can completely change an individual’s calculation. Along similar lines, tuition is a purely student-facing concern, while we hope that these rankings find use by non-students. Because of these concerns, our cost metric is, by weight, the least consequential component of our methodology.
