America's best bang for the buck colleges 2017: our exclusive list of schools that help non-wealthy students attain marketable degrees at affordable prices.

• Author: Kelchen, Robert

Economists Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Nathaniel Hendren received national headlines earlier this year when their Equality of Opportunity Project released college mobility report cards focused on social mobility. These report cards charted the percentage of students from lower-income families who attended a particular college and then moved up the income distribution by the time they reached their early thirties. The top ten colleges for moving students from the bottom to the top income quintile were institutions such as California State University campuses, the City University of New York, and the University of Texas-El Paso. Meanwhile, elite institutions often scored far lower because so few low-income students were actually admitted.

Here at the Washington Monthly, we're thrilled to see more national attention on the topic of social mobility. Since 2012, we've ranked America's four-year colleges and universities based on their "bang for the buck"-that is, the extent to which they charge students who aren't rich a reasonable price for quality education that will advance them in their careers. CUNY, UTEP, and Cal State campuses have all scored high on our rankings over the years because they excel to varying degrees at enrolling low-income students and helping them graduate and find good jobs--exactly the kinds of success markers we expect would produce the long-term results documented by Chetty et al.

Last year, we made major changes to the rankings methodology to incorporate new data from the U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard, which will likely continue to be updated under the Trump administration with useful information on earnings, student loan repayment rates, and the percentage of first-generation students, among a host of other factors. Our 2017 Best Bang for the Buck rankings, which are broken down by region, can be found starting on page 48. (We used the same data and methodology to create the social mobility portion of the main rankings, which begin on page 82; the methodology is explained beginning on page 120.)

The top best bang colleges in each of our five regions reflect a diverse group of institutions. Elite schools Harvard University and Amherst College (tops in the Northeast) both enroll unusually high proportions of first-generation students for their level of selectivity, and both institutions have strong post-college outcomes. Washington and Lee University (Southeast) has just 10 percent of students...