The following is an excerpt from an article that appeared in the Santa Cruz Sentinel and was written by PK Hattis. Click HERE for the full article.

APTOS — A new study has ranked Cabrillo College as the top community college in California and No. 37 in the United States overall.

According to a Cabrillo release, the study was released by SmartAsset, a financial advisory website, and was published this week in The Miami Herald newspaper.

As part of its determination process, SmartAsset compared 616 two-year colleges across the nation offering associate degrees with at least 500 full-time students. The schools were assessed through a ranking system that took into account retention rates, student-to-faculty ratios and tuition and fees using publicly available data from 2022-23.

"This ranking provides a tangible reference for what I've heard anecdotally since arriving at Cabrillo seven years ago, that Cabrillo is the best community college in the state," remarked Superintendent and President at Cabrillo College Matt Wetstein in the release. "I've had people tell me their best professors were at Cabrillo … even better than teachers they had at some of the highest rated universities in the world."

Cabrillo came in at No. 1 in the state with a full-time student retention rate of 74% and a student-to-faculty ratio of 16 to one, according to the release. It also stood out from its peers when it came to affordability, boasting a full-time, in-state tuition fee of about $1,262. California as a whole scored well in this category also, according to the study. The state is home to the most affordable community colleges in the nation, occupying the top 50 spots on the list of least expensive schools, with average fees costing less than $1,500 per year.

Also significant was Cabrillo's status as a federally designated Hispanic Serving Institution, where more than half of its 17,000 students are Latino, according to the release.

The school was founded in 1959 with a class size of 400 and has now grown to two primary campuses in Aptos and Watsonville.