Rice Is Rated the Best Value in U.S. Colleges : Education: Money magazine’s survey looked at quality of students and faculty, facilities and tuition costs.

Rice University, which offers 3,900 students an Ivy League-caliber education at half the price, has been named the nation’s best college buy by Money magazine.

The magazine’s second annual survey identified the 100 best values out of 1,011 colleges and universities analyzed. Factors in the analysis included quality of students and faculty, facilities and tuition.

The only California school in the top 10 was California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, whose mean SAT scores of 1,410 and “top-notch” faculty helped offset its $14,100 a year in tuition costs, Money said.

The top 100 included 56 private schools, including some of the nation’s priciest: Stanford, Yale and the University of Chicago, where tuition exceeds $16,000 but which nonetheless were judged excellent values.

Trenton State College in Trenton, N.J., and Texas A&M; University in College Station, Tex., were rated bargains because they feature tuitions of less than $5,000 even for out-of-state students.

On the cost side, the survey used out-of-state tuition charges for public schools to make them more comparable to private institutions.

In measuring educational quality, the survey used such indicators as student-to-faculty ratio, average Scholastic Aptitude Test scores, library resources, graduation rates, percentage of graduates who earn doctorate degrees and number of graduates who make Standard & Poor’s Executive-College Survey of 70,000 top corporate executives.

Rice charges $7,700 in tuition plus $4,900 in room and board, about half the cost of most Ivy League colleges, thanks largely to a $1-billion endowment. Until 1965, it charged no tuition.

The Houston-based school was founded in 1891 by cotton baron William Marsh Rice, whose dream was to establish a first-rate college open to all, regardless of means. Rice’s engineering, business and science programs rank among the nation’s best.

Harvard failed to make the list because it “declined to disclose data . . . needed to perform our calculations,” according to the magazine.

Harvard spokesman Peter Costa said the university has a policy against releasing average SAT scores and other data that was requested for the survey.