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This State University System Dominates Money’s Best Colleges List for 2025
By Kaitlin Mulhere MONEY RESEARCH COLLECTIVE
An impressive 15 of the California State system’s 23 campuses score in the top 10% of our ratings this year.
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Take a look at Money’s latest Best Colleges list, and you’ll notice a recurring name at the very top: California State University.
Fifteen of the system’s 23 campuses score in the top 10% of our ratings this year. Nine — yes, nine — of them score 5 stars, which is the highest in our scale. Nearly a quarter of the 5-star colleges on the entire 2025-2026 Best Colleges list are Cal State colleges, which have gotten attention in recent years for being engines of social mobility: They excel at enrolling and graduating low-income and minority students.
In addition, they’re comparatively affordable and broadly accessible. Just two of the Cal State schools in Money’s ratings have an acceptance rate below 40%. Most accept upward of 90% of applicants.
As a bonus, the system has the scale to reach a significant population of Americans. Cal State currently enrolls about 460,000 undergraduates in all. In fact, 1 in every 20 Americans with a college degree is a CSU grad, as the chancellor’s office likes to boast.
“It’s pretty impactful, the scale at which we are graduating and serving students,” says Chancellor Mildred García.
Why the Cal State system dominates this year
It’s not uncommon for public colleges to score well on Money’s value-focused analysis. In 2018, the University of California, Irvine nabbed the No. 1 overall spot, and in 2022, the University of Michigan claimed the title. (In 2023, Money switched to a star-rating system, so we no longer have numerical ranks).
Still, the Cal State system’s strength this year is noteworthy. Twenty-two of the 23 campuses make the list, and all score in the top half of the 732 schools rated. (The one campus that wasn’t included this year fell out because it was below our enrollment minimum of 150 freshmen.)
The system’s success on Money’s list is multifaceted. For one, the campuses are extremely affordable when lined up next to other schools. In-state tuition is less than $7,000 a year. Total prices vary by campus, in part because cost of living (and, therefore, expenses like room and board) vary across the state. But generally speaking, the average net price after federal, state and institutional financial aid comes in under $15,000 a year, according to federal education statistics. Students from families earning less than $48,000 generally pay much less — often between about $3,000 to $7,000 a year, depending on the campus.
For comparison, the typical net price among all 732 colleges Money rated this year was about $24,000 for a year. The net price for families earning less than $48,000 was just over $15,000.
All of the schools also perform well on Money’s value-added measures, which compare schools’ actual graduation rates and typical alumni earnings to predicted results based on the academic and socioeconomic profile on campus. Every Cal State college we rated has a positive value-added graduation rate, meaning they’re graduating more students than our model predicts they would.
At California State University, Dominguez Hills, for example, 60% of undergrads receive need-based federal Pell Grants, and the average incoming freshmen GPA is 3.2. Money finds its six-year graduation rate of nearly 69%, which includes students who transferred into the school, is more than 20% higher than predicted.
Finally, while a few campuses, like Cal State Long Beach and Cal Poly Pomona, have consistently scored near the top of Money’s Best Colleges list over the past several years, the system-wide surge really started after we introduced a new measure of economic mobility to our methodology.
Think tank Thirdway’s Economic Mobility Index, which we added to our outcomes bucket in 2022, measures how many lower-income students a college serves and long it takes those students to earn more than they paid for a degree. For many Cal State schools, the index is the strongest of their strengths in Money’s methodology. In Thirdway’s 2024 edition, California State University, Los Angeles has the highest score in the country, and 16 other Cal State campuses break into the top 50.
How the Cal State schools can get even better
All of those highlights don’t mean that the Cal State system doesn’t have its challenges.
Funding is always a concern (the University of California and Cal State systems avoided major cuts in the upcoming new state budget, though leaders say they are still worried about possible federal funding cuts).
And while the schools are standouts for affordability in Money’s analysis, affordability is relative. Most CSU students are working, often more than one job, to cover living expenses while enrolled, García says. While more than 6 in 10 students graduate with no debt, it is still a struggle for many lower- and middle-income families to afford a Cal State degree. (Or any degree, for that matter.)
The system is also still working to raise graduation rates across student populations. The results from the Graduation Initiative 2025, a 10-year effort aimed at increasing completion rates and closing equity gaps, were a partial success. Almost every campus improved its graduation rates, but the uptick wasn’t enough to hit the lofty system-wide goals, and gaps remain for certain student groups, including Black students and Pell Grant recipients.
Still, several Cal State campuses have doubled their on-time completion rates in the past decade or so, helping the system boost its four-year completion rate for first-time students from 19% in 2015 to 36% last year. Thanks to the higher graduation rates, an additional 160,000 people now have bachelor’s degrees, according to García.
The gains were due in part to identifying barriers that were blocking students from advancing, such as prerequisite courses that were a bottleneck because they were hard to get into. Especially critical was a focus on improved data collection and sharing, which allowed faculty to better advise students and target those who needed help. When there were students who were close to finishing their degree, that data allowed for “intrusive advising” to make sure the students crossed the finish line, García says.
“The work is never done in student success,” she says. “Unless we’re getting 100% graduation rates and all equity gaps are gone, the work is still continuing.”
As the graduation initiative winds down, the system is shifting its focus to a new vision for student success: Helping students complete degrees and get solid jobs. Indeed, while a few CSU campuses score well in Money’s outcomes section, most of them land more in the middle on measures like the share of graduates earning more than a high school graduate and the typical salaries 10 years after enrolling.
García says it’s particularly important to help their students focus on career outcomes because most of them don’t have the sort of social network that wealthier students can fall back on to help them get a job. More details on the new initiative are set to come out in the fall, but García says one option is helping students get more paid internships, so they can get job experience while still being able to pay their bills.
The system also strives to maintain better tracking of grads’ transitions into their post-college jobs and how they’re faring later on in their career, too.
The ultimate goal? For Cal State to be “the national model” for delivering a quality, accessible degree, García says.
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Kaitlin Mulhere is an editor at Money.com, where she oversees the website’s higher education coverage, including stories on student debt, college costs and financial aid, and the value of a college degree. She also runs Money’s annual Best Colleges ranking. In a previous role at Money, Mulhere ran the magazine’s franchise rankings, including Best Places to Live, Best Banks and Best Places to Travel. In her time at Money, she’s written about everything from the incredible costs tied to training as an Olympic figure skater to tips for women to afford freezing their eggs to fantasy football-inspired investing. Over the years, she’s participated on several panels on college topics hosted by the Education Writers Association, National Association of State Treasurers and National Press Club; and she’s talked about Money’s work in media outlets including Good Morning America, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Newsday, Great Day Washington and more. Before joining Money in 2015, Mulhere wrote about college news for Inside Higher Ed and covered local education at The Keene (N.H.) Sentinel. She’s a graduate of the University of Florida, with bachelor’s degrees in journalism and political science.