Coastline kudos

The Fountain Valley Community College ranked tops in the country

Fountain Valley is home to the top community college in the country.

Coastline Community College earned the No. 1 community college ranking in a Huffington Post blog posted in April.

The rankings were based on which colleges offered a low-cost education, good return on investment and high success rate.

“To measure the cost of education we looked at in state tuition for one academic year. To measure return on investment we looked at the ratio of starting salary for graduates to the cost of the education. To measure success rate we looked at the percentage of students who enroll at the community college, graduate and then go on to transfer to a four-year institution,” blog writers explained.

“Using these three factors, we ranked the community colleges by how many standard deviations they outperformed the mean in each category. It gave us a list of the top ten community colleges in the country,” the blog writers said.

The blog noted that Coastline has 21 academic departments largely in educational and medical support fields.

Coastline graduates 1 3/4 times their total education costs their first year working after graduating, and in-state students pay $2,200 less a year than the national average to go to school, making it both the least-expensive school for local students and the top-performing community college on our list, the bloggers noted.