The Best Colleges for Securing Your Loan's Safety

The latest Higher Education Research Institute freshmen study shows that 82 percent of incoming students selected being “very well off financially” as essential or very important to their college choice — and it had better be, as the national student default rate rose to 11.3 percent.

In today’s job market, a college education is an almost mandatory investment. It’s not a particularly risky one, and in most cases it pays off — but just as not all schools are equal in how much of a return they provide, some schools are particularly risky choices.

And while a college’s median salaries and employment rates serve as excellent benchmarks for success, just as important is the darker side — the probability that graduates will fail and be stuck with an enormous burden… one that weighs about four years and $150,000, on average.

To help showcase some of these educational AAA investments, in addition to the map at the top of this article, we at Zippia have put together a list of the best educational investments by state.

If you were wondering about the least safe investments in your future we’ve got that too — but here are the ten Most Financially Secure Colleges, with the full list at the bottom of this page:

Bellin College — Wisconsin
University of Baltimore — Maryland
Rice University — Texas
Kettering University — Michigan
Allen College — Iowa
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology — Indiana
Harvard University — Massachusetts
College of William and Mary — Virginia
Yale University — Connecticut
Bob Jones University — South Carolina

How we determined the Most Secure College Investments

Looking at a college education as an investment, we used several factors to come up with a ranking index: how much each school costs, what the risk is, and how easy it is to pay it back.

We used Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) to determine how much the schools cost to attend — which is the cost of the investment. To approximate the risk of taking out loans to finance this venture, we took Department of Education data on school default rates.

And finally, we used CollegeScoreCard data to gauge the median salary at six years — this is the most critical payment success period. We assigned values to these metrics to select the Most Financially Risky Colleges in each state. Then we ranked each state’s school according to their rating.

1. Wisconsin

College: Bellin College
City: Bellevue, WI
Default Rate: 0 percent
Bellin College was founded as Deaconess Sanitarium Training School for Nurses and that’s what they do: Bachelor of Science in Nursing
Bachelor of Science in Radiologic Sciences
Bachelor of Science in Diagnostic Medical Sonography

2. Maryland

College: University of Baltimore
City: Baltimore, MD
Default Rate: .8 percent
Guard Dragon

3. Texas

College: Rice University
City: Houston, Texas
Default Rate: .3 percent
Shaving cream thing

4. Michigan

College: Kettering University
City: Flint, MI
Default Rate: 1.9 percent
Formerly GM

5. Iowa

College: Allen College
City: Waterloo, IA
Default Rate: 1 percent
Not Allen University, all about health care

Maybe it shouldn’t.

6. Indiana

College: Rose-Hulman
City: Terre Haute, IN
Default Rate: .4 percent
Yay, you beat Notre Dame at something.

7. Massachusetts

College: Harvard University
City: Boston, MA
Default Rate: .8 percent
Broadview University was founded in 1977, began offering bachelor’s degrees in 2005 before losing its accreditor was de-recognized by the Department of Education accreditation in 2016. So, there’s that.

8. Virginia

College: The College of William and Mary
City: Williamsburg, VA
Default Rate: .8 percent
One of the country’s few royal colleges, second oldest after harvard.

9. Connecticut

College: Yale University
City: New Haven, CT
Default Rate: .6 percent
Not Harvard.

10. South Carolina

College: Bob Jones University
City: Greenville, SC
Default Rate: 1.3 percent
Bunch of Billy Grahams

Some of the takeaways

The Department of Education began tracking individual schools loan default rates in an effort to measure quality outcomes of federal loan programs.

And these institutions care about Big Brother watching, because if a school has a cohort default rate over 30 percent for three years or 40 percent for one year, it loses eligibility to participate in the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL), Direct Loan, and Federal Pell Grant Programs for the year.

One of the most important things to today’s college freshmen is that the college they choose will help them get a good job — but the most important thing is that the college experience will at least not leave them crushed by a mountain of debt and bad credit — check graduation rates and accreditation.

Most Financially Secure Colleges

As a note, the University of Wyoming is in this list by default… there are so few colleges in Wyoming that it’s also the most financially insecure bachelor’s-granting college as well.

Rank	State	College	Loan Default Rate	Salary At 6 Years	Tuition
1	WI	Bellin College	0.00%	53,100	20,500
2	MD	University of Baltimore	0.80%	52,100	14,035
3	TX	Rice	0.30%	60,100	42,253
4	MI	Kettering University	1.90%	62,600	10,944
5	IA	Allen College	1.00%	47,600	17,373
6	IN	Rose-Hulman	0.40%	64,800	45,141
7	MA	Harvard University	0.80%	106,300	45,278
8	VA	William and Mary	0.80%	48,300	33,946
9	CT	Yale	0.60%	76,400	47,600
10	SC	Bob Jones	1.30%	48,500	14,900
11	CA	Stanford University	0.70%	102,300	46,320
12	NC	Duke	0.40%	87,600	49,241
13	NJ	Princeton	0.90%	71,600	43,450
14	NY	Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute	0.09%	62,900	49,341
15	NE	Clarkson College	1.70%	46,200	13,904
16	PA	Carnegie Mellon University	0.60%	70,900	50,665
17	OH	Case Western Reserve University	1.10%	65,800	44,560
18	MO	Washington University	0.80%	59,700	48,093
19	CO	Colorado School of Mines	2.10%	66,200	26,090
20	NH	Dartmouth College	0.90%	70,500	49,506
21	DE	University of Delaware	1.90%	44,100	21,970
22	OR	University of Portland	1.10%	48,500	42,288
23	IL	University of Chicago	0.90%	69,800	51,351
24	WA	Gonzaga	1.10%	43,100	37,990
25	TN	Vanderbilt	1.20%	58,600	44,712
26	MN	College of Saint Benedict	0.90%	40,000	40,846
27	RI	Bryant University	1.60%	51,000	39,808
28	ND	North Dakota State at Fargo	3.20%	41,100	13,745
29	GA	Emory	1.50%	62,600	46,314
30	WY	University of Wyoming	4.20%	40,200	10,262
31	VT	Middlebury	1.50%	50,600	47,828
32	AL	Samford	2.00%	41,000	28,370
33	FL	University of Miami	1.90%	50,500	45,724
34	NM	New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology	5.30%	42,200	12,875
35	HI	Hawaii Pacific University	4.40%	43,900	22,440
36	AR	John Brown University	3.90%	42,500	24,468
37	ME	Bowdoin College	1.30%	44,800	48,212
38	LA	LSU	4.90%	42,300	18,295
39	KY	University of Kentucky	4.40%	39,000	17,602
40	UT	Westminster	2.70%	42,600	31,528
41	OK	University of Tulsa	2.90%	46,400	39,521
42	KS	Baker University	4.80%	45,200	27,160
43	NV	University of Nevada at Reno	5.20%	39,800	13,857
44	MT	Carroll College	2.10%	36,700	30,754
45	SD	Augustana	2.20%	35,400	30,090
46	AK	Alaska Pacific University	5.00%	39,900	19,610
47	MS	Millsaps	2.50%	35,700	35,510
48	ID	Northwest Nazarene University	3.60%	34,300	28,150
49	AZ	University of Arizona	5.60%	38,300	22,016
50	WV	Wheeling Jesuit	5.00%	37,800	28,030

Never miss an opportunity that’s right for you.

Author

David Luther

David Luther was the Content Marketing Editor for the Zippia Advice blog. He developed partnerships with external reporting agencies in addition to generating original research and reporting for the Zippia Career Advice blog. David obtained his BA from UNC Chapel Hill.