KNOXVILLE — The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, provides students one of the best values in public education according to the latest rankings from Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine.
The magazine’s annual “100 Best Values in Public Colleges” ranks American colleges based on academic quality and affordability. The Best Values program this year evaluated 120 public colleges and universities. UT was the only Tennessee public university to make the top 100, placing 58th overall, up six spots from last year.
Kiplinger’s considers characteristics including entrance exam scores, admissions and retention rates, graduation rates, student-faculty ratios, total cost for in-state students and average debt of students upon graduation. Academic quality measurements make up two-thirds of the total score, while costs and financial aid factors count for one-third of the scoring.
“We strive to make the University of Tennessee an affordable and accessible institution and are proud to be nationally recognized for our efforts,” said UT Knoxville Chancellor Jimmy G. Cheek. “We have continued to increase access by creating need-based scholarship programs so that we can offer the best education possible for the best and brightest students.”
The HOPE Scholarship is available to Tennessee high school graduates who earn at least a 21 on their ACT and have an overall weighted grade-point average of 3.0 or better. About 95 percent of UT Knoxville’s in-state freshmen received the HOPE Scholarship in 2009.
In recent years, UT Knoxville has created several need-based scholarship programs that supplement the HOPE Scholarship and help ensure that money isn’t a stumbling block for academically eligible students who want to attend.
The Tennessee Pledge scholarships help students from low-income families attend the university and allows those students to graduate debt-free by paying for mandatory college costs not covered by other federal or state aid. The Tennessee Promise scholarships target students from high schools that have not traditionally sent many of their graduates to UT Knoxville.
In addition, the university has launched the “Achieve the Dream” program that makes grant money available to Tennessee students from lower-middle-income families whose incomes are too high to qualify them for Pell grants or the Pledge scholarship, but who still need financial help with college costs.
For more information about Kiplinger’s 2009-2010 Best Values in Public Colleges rankings, visit http://www.kiplinger.com/reports/best-college-values/.
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C O N T A C T :
Kristi Hintz (865-974-3993, khintz@utk.edu)