Sacred Heart University officials and alumni are defending their school this week against a ?least affordable? moniker.
Newsweek magazine ranked the university, which has a graduate campus at Griswold High School offering education and teacher preparation programs for students from all over Eastern Connecticut, the least affordable college in the nation.
The survey focused solely on undergraduate tuition and housing costs, student debt and the mid-career wages of graduates who earned bachelor?s degrees at the universities surveyed.
Grad school left out
?The Newsweek survey does not address graduate school, and we don?t anticipate that the ranking will impact our very successful graduate program in Griswold,? university spokeswoman Tracy Deer-Mirek wrote in an email Wednesday.
Newsweek ranked affordability with a focus on long-term investment, the magazine wrote on its website. That included tuition, including room and board ($50,500 at Sacred Heart); debt levels (99 percent of Sacred Heart students graduate with debt; average debt is higher than $40,000); financial aid (92 percent of Sacred Heart students receive financial aid, of which $14,500 comes through grants); and career earnings potential (median starting salary for Sacred Heart grads is $44,800, mid-career median is $69,500).
While the numbers are accurate, using career earnings potential is a mistake for schools such as Sacred Heart, Deer-Mirek said.
Different school now
?The salary component is biased against schools like Sacred Heart that have experienced significant growth in the past 30 years,? she wrote. ?Our mid-career graduates, referenced in the Newsweek survey, attended a much different university than Sacred Heart is today, with fewer academic programs.?
Making the top of Newsweek?s most affordable list were some of the nation?s most elite schools, including Yale at No. 14, and a smattering of public and small private colleges in the South and Midwest.
That threw recent Sacred Heart alumnus Alex Stangle for a loop.
?It?s an unfair tag,? said Stangle, of Taftville, who graduated in May with a degree in athletic training and hopes to go to medical school. ?It?s almost going to hurt the university that I loved. I had a great experience there, and I wouldn?t trade it for anything.?
While he admits he has nearly $100,000 in student debt, he said he has no doubt he?ll be able to pay that off once he finishes medical school.
Students like him, who plan to continue their educations, are one of the flaws in the study, he said.
?They only consider bachelor?s degrees. In my athletic training class there were 18 of us. Fourteen of us are going on to a higher degree. A lot of kids are going further in life. They need to look at more factors.?
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