California State University, Long Beach remained on Washington Monthly’s “Best Bang for the Buck” list for its third consecutive year, despite a change in the ranking system used to rate the universities.
Under the new classification, Washington Monthly separated universities by region. CSULB placed 11th across the Western schools. CSULB ranked 10th overall in the list last year, across 386 universities.
“The key [message] of the university’s mission is access and quality,” said Michael Uhlenkamp, executive director of media and digital news at CSULB.
Washington Monthly ranked universities based on their student loan default rate, graduation rate, whether graduates go on to earn enough to pay off their loans, net price attendance and number of students receiving Pell Grants.
The university’s student default loan rate for 2010-2011 was 5.5 percent, Uhlenkamp said. That rate was 1.2 percent lower than the rate of the California State University system and 3.4 percent lower than the average national public four-year institutions rate, according to College Portraits, a data collection website for financial aid at different universities.
International computer science graduate Meet Trivedi said that even despite paying elevated international prices, he still feels that he is paying less than a majority of international students in the United States. Full-time international students pay the non-resident tuition of $7,690.00 per semester, according to the CSULB website.
“You really can’t beat the price, plus considering the location and facilities available to students, it is worth attending Cal State Long Beach,” Trivedi said.
Uhlenkamp said that about 70 percent of all CSULB students receive financial aid in some form. CSULB students collected over $300 million in financial aid during the 2014-2015 school year, he said.
The average tuition fee in 2013-2014 for CSULB full-time undergraduate students was $6,240 a year. Students on average paid only a third of that price, about $2,644, because of the financial aid they received, Uhlenkamp said.
Uhlenkamp said that graduation hit an “all-time high” over the last decade, rising 20 percent, “which is unheard of.”
the systematic initiatives in place to help students with proper advising are to make sure as many students as possible are graduating in as close to four years as possible, according to Uhlenkamp.
Duan Jackson, executive director of the University Center for Undergraduate Advising, said that the advising center has made an investment on using new e-advising tools to help students with their academic progress.
“It’s a partnership that’s being developed between students and advisors,” Jackson said.
One of the online programs is called Predictive Analytics and keeps student records in order to alert advisors when a student sways off track, Jackson said.
“[The university is] making advisors more accessible,” Jackson said. “We now get to spend a little more time with students. We can do a 30 second ‘gut check’ to get an overview of where a student is, [allowing] us to have a little more in-depth conversation with students.”
Sophomore fashion design major Haitanna Perez said that she really likes all the labs and help centers on campus.
“You’re getting a great education plus all the study help you need at such an affordable price,” Perez said. “We’re all going to have loans in the end. I’d just rather pay back $10,000 rather than $50,000.”