Cheapest Schools

The cost of a four-year degree has been rising exponentially in the past three decades. Here are the schools where a diploma is least likely to leave you in debt.

Methodology: though the value of a college education is unquantifiable, the actual cost can be boiled down to dollars and cents. To figure out which schools will sap you of the least amount of currency, Newsweek first sorted the top 500 public and private four-year colleges in the country according to tuition (60%). We also wanted to consider how much help students receive, in the form of scholarships, federal, state, and local financial aid, on a college-by-college basis. So we also considered the average amount of financial aid (20%) and the percentage of students receiving financial aid (20%). All data is according to the National Center for Education Statistics. In-state and out-of-state tuition were both considered for state colleges.

As a result, even the select American schools that offer full-tuition scholarship for all students, such as Cooper Union, but that have relatively high published tuition rates may not have made the list.