Even the best colleges are bigger in Texas.
Rice University is Money’s top private college in Texas, while Texas A&M University — one of the largest colleges in the country — is the highest-scoring public college in the state.
Overall, big public universities are the (lone) star of the show in the country’s second-largest state. Of the top 15 universities in Texas in Money’s latest annual analysis, 12 are public schools.
Tuition, average financial aid, and typical student and parent borrowing all come into play in Money’s Best College rankings. But beyond affordability, we also consider graduation rates and average earnings after college to build a list of schools that are solid educational and financial bets. (You can read the full breakdown of how we rank colleges here.)
Surveys consistently show that most students attend a college that is close to home; 56% of freshmen, for example, enrolled within 100 miles of their home, according to a survey out of the University of California, Los Angeles. So in addition to our main rankings, we’ve also sliced the results by geography.
To rank the Best Colleges in Texas, we looked at the top-scoring colleges on our main list of about 600 colleges, plus the schools on our separate selective colleges list.
