- The next accreditation review was scheduled for December 31, 2021.
Academic/career counseling services
Employment services for current students
Placement services for program completers
If students come back for a second year, that suggests they are satisfied and able to succeed. The schools with satisfied freshmen should score above that dark gray 50% mark.
Schools are required to report the ratio of students per instructor, but look for a small number of students for every full-time instructor as your best indicator of personal attention and a modern well-integrated curriculum.
Who might be attending school with you? We'll look at what degrees most students have received, whether they are on campus or online, a little about their path, and the overall student body size. Our aim is to give some idea of what the campus culture might be.
This donut chart shows you what degrees were awarded by Ben Franklin Career Center last year, and gives you a good idea of this school's focus. Make sure this school's focus matches your goals.
There are performance problems with many online-focused schools -- you can read about this in an Ididio case study, but you may want some online options to give you greater flexibility.
You will be most happy at a school with a large number of students who are like you, whether that's someone who enters right out of high school, or someone who is transferring, or someone who isn't ready to work towards a degree.
Another breakdown that can help is a view of the student body size. Here we show student counts, including part-time versus full-time students. If the proportion of students that best describes you is relatively small, then is it possible that another school might be better-prepared to meet your needs?
A high proportion of international and out-of-state students speaks to reputation and offers an opportunity for diverse interactions in and out of class.
The NPR article A Campus More Colorful Than Reality: Beware That College Brochure emphasizes the importance of judging a school's diversity based on solid data as promotional materials are eager to suggest a multicultural student body.
Student race is only categorized for non-international students, and international students are listed separately.
The age distribution at a school can tell you a lot about its mission. If you're looking for a traditional undergraduate experience, you may prefer to see students who are mostly younger than 25 (lighter shades), but if you want support as a returning student, a large number of students 25 and older (darker shades) may better suit your needs.
There are multiple outside factors that can affect the gender balance of students recruited by schools. As an example, within less-affluent families higher education is more frequently attained by women than by men, a phenomenon explored in the Atlantic. Therefore, schools serving lower-income populations may be more likely to see a gender imbalance. On the other hand, some colleges may offer predominantly degrees that are stereotypically associated with a single gender, affecting the ratio of men to women accordingly.
In the folders below, you can explore your options for study. The folders are grouped and colored by broad field, and you can see the number of students who have completed degrees in each field by following the colors in our chart showing graduations. You can...
- Filter the programs by the award level that interests you.
- Use the search key to limit the listings to all relevant progrmas.
- Select a specific program from this menu to see some great details!
- Healthcare office support
- Education by Level or Special Needs
- Precision Production
- Mechanic and Repair Technologies
Most schools publish tuition rates that give them room to offer both scholarships and financial aid where applicable. Your best guess at what you might pay is to see what others with similar family incomes have paid. A more tailored and accurate estimate is available at this school's net price calculator.
With their net price calculators, many colleges and universities give an idea of what merit-based aid might accompany need-based aid. For schools that share such data, we also provide financial aid data in the Finanical Aid sections.
There are some caveats to consider when using the net price estimates:
- The net price calculation is weighted by this school's proportion of students living on- and off-campus and this school's estimate of off-campus costs, which may cause the net price methodology be a bit inconsistent from school to school.
- Parental income and student financial aid eligibility is sometimes more complicated than the simple family income number reported here.
- The net price calculation for all students is inclusive of students who received any institutional or government aid, but at the family income levels the net price only considers the tuition paid by those who qualified for federal aid.
You can get a little better guess at what you would pay by using this school's net price calculator.
The donut, based on 39 full-time first-time degree seeking students at Ben Franklin Career Center, shows the percentage of those who received any financial aid (including merit-based scholarships), subdivided by family income.
Let's look over the past few years at what in-state freshmen who received any financial aid actually paid for tuition, fees, books, and living expenses on average, and how that compares to the in-state tuition usually paid for other public universities in your context group.
Here's a quick summary of costs to attend Ben Franklin Career Center. You will find the most up-to-date information at their website for admissions. The costs below are for out-of-state students, and you can switch by clicking the other button.
Understanding the rules and process that determine who gets financial aid can be intimidating. Here are some quick links to help:
Visit Ben Franklin Career Center's Net Price Calculator for the most accurate estimate of your anticipated costs. Every school publishes a Net Price Calculator that does its best to give you a fair estimate of what you might expect to pay. Many calculators consider your high school record as part of the calculation. This will be far more accurate than any of the averages or published tuition values that you see here.
FederalStudentAid, a government site that will walk you through the federal financial aid process. There are a number of kinds of student loans and other aid, and this site can walk you through all of the choices you will need to make.
This school does not report any housing for students.
If you are a veteran, it's worth digging around to find a military-friendly campus. We think this article about how colleges might help veterans might be a good starting point for questions to ask the Admissions office before you choose to attend. It's also good to be aware that many for-profit schools are behaving as predators, hungry for GI Bill dollars. Watching out for those schools is no different for veterans than for all students: judge very critically using our "Student Satisfaction and Success" tab for undergraduate programs. We wish we had the same data to support graduate programs; however, we think the undergraduate data is a good starting point for judging overall quality.
- Yellow Ribbon Program
Where a school spends and collects its money can suggest a lot about the educational experience it offers. The tabs below offer a look at spending that is important for the quality of your experience if you attend.
Instructional expenses are primarily the salary and benefits paid to the heart of a school: its full-time instructors. High expenditures in this area suggest care in hiring enough highly qualified full-time faculty to provide personal attention and up-to-date subject-area excellence.
The main focus in this section is an analysis of the financial stability of Ben Franklin Career Center. However, as a public institution, Ben Franklin Career Center doesn't follow the same rules of survival as private institutions. Even if a public college or university closes, we think it's highly likely that you would be presented with multiple good options for transferring your credits fully at a different state institution. The only measure that we believe is likely to impact you is a high dependence on state appropriations.
Appropriations are monies provided by local, state, or federal governments generally intended to be applied towards annual operating expenses -- your tax dollars at work! Such state-level funding is what makes public institutions affordable for in-state students. If a school has a high proportion of its budget from appropriations, then it is especially vulnerable to the whims of the government. If you want to see an example of this, check out the public schools in Illinois, whose elected officials decided they wanted to drastically reduce spending on education. The context schools here consist only of public and private-not-for profit schools; for-profit institutions do not report on this category of funding.
Ben Franklin Career Center is a public school. Along with private not-for-profit schools, publicly-controlled schools do not have the goal of annual profit, but they do want to have healthy finances with adequate revenue to meet all expenses. On the other hand, private for-profit schools have creating a profit for shareholders as an annual goal.
We divided revenue and expenses for Ben Franklin Career Center into categories to give some insight to what may have influenced peaks and ditches in the chart above. The purple shades correspond most directly to student education. The blue shades, auxiliary expenses and revenue, are often related to room and board. We show investment gains and losses in apricot.
Related to the previous question of whether the annual revenue stream is stable is the question, "How deep are this school's pockets?" For many schools, a major source of annual income is investment growth. Schools with large endowments have a built-in revenue stream, although you'll see in the accompanying graphs that this revenue stream is highly dependent on the nation's economy. You can choose how to examine the depth of Ben Franklin Career Center's resources by selecting from the buttons below.
Here we examine assets at Ben Franklin Career Center in context, and it seems most fair to adjust for the size of the institution. We examine the assets per full-time-equivalent student so that we level the playing field for size.
There's a catch to these assets, though. Many gifts to a school's endowment have strings attached; the money is restricted to a specific purpose. Assets shown in green below are unrestricted, and are very important to a school's ability to meet its financial obligations. Some assets are the land and buildings that a school must have in order to function, and these may appear as green (unrestricted assets) but are nonetheless less helpful in meeting annual financial commitments. This look at assets is only a piece of the puzzle as we decide if a school is stable.
