The US Department of Education released its college score card in mid-February. The score card compares affordability and value at American universities by examinging net prices, graduation rates, and monthly student borrowing.

We collected the score card information for Boston-area universities and ranked them by average net price in this gallery. You can peruse the complete data for these schools on our data page. Local universities respond to the score card in this Boston Globe article.

Do you agree with the Department of Education's findings of schools that have a lot of "bang for your educational buck?" Why? What other metrics should be considered in ranking colleges' affordability and value?

Share your thoughts on how Boston-area universities fared on the college score card.

Well the bang for the buck should be a combination of average yearly net cost, graduation rate, and post graduation income.  If a school is cheap, but almost nobody graduates, on average it is not worth any price whatsoever because most people aren't getting a degree.  Then you also have to add in post graduation income.  If it's cheap and everyone graduates, but no one makes much money once doing so, it's not worth the investment either.  So ideally you would divide yearly cost by graduation percentage, or maybe even graduation percentage squared to punish schools that graduate few attendess, and divide the total by average yearly income after graduation.  This would show bias towards places like engineering oriented schools because of high post graduation incomes, but I think that is a bias representative of the real world outcome of college educations.  What I believe would rise to the top would be good academic schools that have been around for quite some time and have wealthy alumni and thus large endowments and good financial aid.  The Ivies, MIT, Wellesley, Stanford, schools everyone thinks are good already, but people often think are too expensive.  The reality is, the best schools are the most affordable in the end.  

Where is MassArt?

Wentworth?