Students on the Cochise College Douglas Campus
Cochise College is the third best community college in the country, according to a study by SmartAsset.com publicized in a Huffington Post article on Friday.
The study seeks to determine the best community colleges by analyzing cost of attendance, return on investment and success rates of nearly 700 community colleges in the United States.
“This is a nice recognition and a symbol of the hard work of our faculty and staff, our students, and our governing board,” said Cochise College President J.D. Rottweiler.
Coastline Community College of Fountain Valley, Calif., earned the top spot, and Northern Oklahoma College in Tonkawa, Okla., came in second. Cochise College was praised for its affordability.
“In-state students at Cochise College pay only $1,680 per academic year, and once graduated, they make 63.5 percent more than their college costs in a year’s salary,” according to the article.
The article describes the methods used to determine cost, return on investment and success rates at each institution: “To measure the cost of education we looked at in state tuition for one academic year. To measure return on investment we looked at the ratio of starting salary for graduates to the cost of the education. To measure success rate we looked at the percentage of students who enroll at the community college, graduate and then go on to transfer to a four-year institution. Using these three factors, we ranked the community colleges by how many standard deviations they outperformed the mean in each category.”
SmartAsset was founded in 2011 with a mission to “provide actionable, objective and easy-to-understand financial analytics and advice,” according to its website. Its Facebook page continues: “At the heart of our service is a decision engine and optimization tool that measures the efficacy of different strategies, quantifies the true cost of financing alternatives and recommends specific financial products based on their suitability and cost.”