Kansas State University

MANHATTAN — Kansas State University is the highest-rated school from Kansas to make a national website's list of the best value colleges in the Midwest. Great Value Colleges' list ranks the university in the top 15 among public schools — higher than many other top schools in the region, including Ohio State University, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, University of Missouri and University of Oklahoma.

Great Value Colleges is a noted website to help students with their college searches. To make its list of the top value colleges in the region, Kansas State University scored highly on eight quality indicators that the website calls a good measure of a student's potential "depth and breadth" of experience at an institution: graduation rate, freshmen retention rate, student-to-faculty ratio, percentage of classes taught by graduate assistants, average entrance ACT score, number of campus organizations and number of academic programs. Affordability also is taken into account as well as inclusion on Forbes magazine's list of top colleges — where the university has consistently ranked.

Pat Bosco, Kansas State University's vice president for student life and dean of students, said the university ranks highly because of its more than 250 majors and options, 475-plus student organizations, a student-to-faculty ratio of 19 to 1 and a focus on programs to help students succeed from their first year at the university. In addition, the university is the only state-supported university to rank among the top 10 of all U.S. schools for the combined total number of scholars in Rhodes, Marshall, Truman, Goldwater and Udall competitions in the last 25 years.

"It is always wonderful when an outside group ranks quality and cost and picks K-State among its top 15 in the nation," Bosco said. "This recognition is a direct result of what goes on in our classrooms and within campus life every day. Our institutional commitment to remain as attainable to our students and families as possible is very important to all of us, and I'm glad others have noticed what defines our university."

The website gives Kansas State University high marks for its involvement in educational initiatives, including a multimillion dollar grant from the National Science Foundation's Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation program to help underrepresented students at the university earn bachelor's degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields and then go on to graduate study programs. Kansas State University also is recognized for its highly rated aviation program; award-winning sustainability efforts like the Environmental Protection Agency's Campus Rainworks Challenge; top-rated student organizations such as K-State's Black Student Union, which has been named best in the Big 12 Conference seven times in the last nine years; and much more.