The Best Affordable Colleges: Cheap for Everyone, Not Just In-State Students

Most “cheap colleges” lists rank on in-state tuition. That only helps if you already live in the right state. Move one state over and the same school can cost three times as much.

This list ranks on out-of-state tuition. It is the one price that applies to everyone, so every school below is cheap no matter where you are applying from.

89 four-year colleges currently charge out-of-state tuition under $15,000 a year. The 10 cheapest are below, starting at $6,688 a year at Brigham Young University and running to $10,058. For comparison, a typical out-of-state bill at a public flagship runs past $28,000.

How We Picked These Schools

Six rules, and a query applies all six. No school name and no dollar figure on this page is typed in by hand.

That is not a technical flourish. An earlier version of this article named eight schools with tuition figures a person had typed in, and within a month they had drifted. We had UNC Pembroke at around $5,000 a year when the real number was $7,648, off by more than 50% on the article’s own headline claim. Families check these numbers. So the page now reads them live, straight from the same data behind every school profile on the site.

The rules themselves: tuition is the out-of-state published rate, under $15,000 a year. Schools must be four-year institutions that primarily award bachelor’s degrees or higher, which rules out community colleges, including the ones that grant a handful of bachelor’s degrees. We drop for-profits. We also drop any school where more than 50% of undergraduates study exclusively online, because a cheap national rate at an online school is a different product from a campus you show up to.

Two more rules exist to keep the answer useful rather than merely correct. Schools need at least 1,000 undergraduates, which keeps out the federal service academies. Their near-zero tuition buys a five-year service obligation, not a bargain. And we show at most one school per state, because a list whose whole premise is “cheap wherever you are from” fails if six of its ten entries sit in the same place. The cheapest school in each state takes the slot.

The online rule is the one that does the most work. Rank purely on price and online institutions take the top of the list, ahead of every residential campus, because they charge one low rate nationwide. The same criteria drive our Most Affordable Colleges ranking, which orders the same pool by enrollment instead of price if you want the largest campuses rather than the cheapest.

The 10 Cheapest Four-Year Colleges for Out-of-State Students

What This List Does Not Tell You

These are published tuition rates before financial aid, so what you actually pay is usually less. Sticker price is used because it is the only figure that compares cleanly across every institution in the country; aid packages vary so much that two schools with identical tuition can leave two families paying very different amounts. Room, board and fees come on top of every number here.

Price also says little about outcomes. Before ruling a school in or out, check its graduation rate and post-graduation earnings on its profile page, and run its net price calculator. If a school here happens to be in your home state, your cost will be lower still than the out-of-state figure that qualified it. You can narrow the full set by state and lifestyle in the Budget Friendly collection.

Price gets you a shortlist. It does not get you a decision.