Dive Brief:
- Colleges with the best-ranked food also score highly in U.S. News & World Report overall rankings.
- The overlap points out that the battle for students extends beyond the classroom and into high-end amenities.
- While they spend big on dining, many wealthy schools either enroll few poor students or charge them more than half what their families earn in a year — or both.
Dive Insight:
A chart puts the issue in focus, plotting the percentage of students with Pell grants, the size of a college's endowment and their ranking on a list of best college food. Some schools, such as MIT, do rank highly in both food quality and giving financial aid to poor students. Others, an analysis argues [PDF link], are competing for wealthy students and leaving behind poorer ones.