The 20 US public colleges that offer the best value for your money

Some public colleges give you more bang for your buck.

Kiplinger recently released its list of 300 best-value public and private schools, ranked based on quality - including test scores of incoming students, admission rates, academic support, and graduation rates - and cost measures, such as total cost, financial-aid packages, and average debt at graduation.

Read Kiplinger's full methodology.

Here, we rounded up the 20 best-value public colleges on the list for out-of-state students, along with total annual cost and average student debt at graduation for each. Note that there are separate rankings for the best-value public schools for in-state students, with some overlap - UNC Chapel Hill, for example, ranked as the best-value college for in- and out-of-state students.

We also included the median earnings of students at each school 10 years after starting their studies, from the US Department of Education's College Scorecard: