There are a number of public universities that are highly ranked and well respected. They are reasonably priced. The best are University of California at Berkeley, University of Virginia, University of Michigan, UCLA, Georgia Tech and University of North Carolina.

US News has a list of colleges that it feels are the best value for the money. I’ve included the link below.

UCLA

UC Berkley

University of Michigan—Ann Arbor

U of NC – Chapel Hill

College of William and Mary

Georgia Tech

A lot of these schools also offer (or used to offer a few years back) need blind admission to all of or most of their admitted classes. That meant that they would admit students without being aware of their financial situations and then find a way to make it work with the students.

Anyway, good luck. There are tons of really wonderful places out there.

You could try University of Virgina, New York University, Carnegie Mellon University…somewhere along those lines.

Generally, it’s hard to find a prestigious college that’s not even remotely expensive.

I don’t know about Penn State University, you could try that…

Otherwise…University of Illinois-Urbana is a nice school, pretty cheap.

It’s almost impossible to find “prestigious” and “cheap” in describing the same college.