BALTIMORE (WJZ) — Right now in America, there are more than six million students enrolled in public four-year colleges and universities.  Some parents and students are getting a better deal than others. 

Mike Schuh reports students going to five schools in Maryland are getting their money’s worth.

Picking the right college can be a tricky business.  They’re all expensive.  Before you move in, how do you know if you’re getting a good value?  Kiplinger’s Magazine has a public school ranking.  It’s here we find the turtle ranking very high.  Nationwide, the University of Maryland ranks fifth. 

Four other Maryland schools made the top 100.  St. Mary’s College is 40, Salisbury is 60, Towson is 78 and UMBC is 91.  This is out of 1,600 colleges nationwide.

To put this in perspective, at least as far as the University of Maryland is concerned, they’re better than UCLA, Rutgers, the University of Illinois and Ohio State.

At Towson, there’s joy at this recognition.

“We rank 78, which is about 19 slots above where we ranked the previous year, so we’re very thrilled about this repeated recognition by Kiplinger,” said Towson University Vice President Gary Rubin.

There are a whole list of criteria which determines a best value college.  Towson knows one thing about its program.

“We have a history, we’re a rather large institution—22,000 students—having relatively small classes.  The average student/faculty ratio being one to 20 in the classroom,” Rubin said.

Johns Hopkins, Loyola and Hood College in Frederick all made that magazine’s list of the 100 Top Private Schools in 2011.