Most Affordable Colleges in New York 2025

Badge for MOST AFFORDABLE COLLEGES IN NEW-YORK

By Dr. James Barham
Reviewed By Jenn Finley

Updated: Oct 3, 2024

Key Takeaways

Many of the schools in our ranking of the most affordable colleges in New York have tuition of less than $10,000.
Public universities in New York are typically more affordable than private colleges.
Even though public universities in New York are typically more affordable, private colleges may award more financial aid, scholarships, and grants, lowering the overall cost of tuition.

Table of Contents

10 Most Affordable Colleges in New York 2025

City College of New York
+1
Brooklyn College
+2
United States Military Academy
+2
Stony Brook University
–3
University at Buffalo
–2
Hunter College
+1
Binghamton University
–1
Baruch College
+1
Queens College, City University of New York
+1
University at Albany, SUNY
–2

2025 Ranking Update

Our Influence Ranking Engine™ leverages machine learning to track the real-world influence of colleges and universities over time. Below you’ll see which schools gained or lost ground for the 2025 school year.

The United States Military Academy and Brooklyn College both gained 2 positions in our ranking of the most affordable colleges in New York. The USMA strengthened its leadership programs by adding more extensive field training and leadership opportunities for their cadets, all while still maintaining their affordable tuition rates.

Brooklyn College has expanded their online and hybrid learning options, helping the school to gain steam in our ranking this year. They have also added new academic majors in high-demand fields like data science, healthcare administration, and digital media, providing students with more career-oriented opportunities.

How do we determine New York's best affordable colleges and universities?

Methodology

The people affiliated with a school are ultimately what make it great! If you are serious about finding the best colleges and universities for a bachelor’s degree, you should be asking where the most influential professors are teaching and whether their graduates are themselves advancing the school’s reputation for academic excellence in their fields of study.

Most ranking sites rely on an opaque combination of reputation surveys and arbitrary performance metrics. Concentrated Influence provides a ranking that is freer from bias, insulated from manipulation, and reflective of real-world educational outcomes.

To rank the influence of schools, we first determine the influence of scholars and professionals based on the number of citations and publications they have had over the past 10 years. In addition to publications and citations, we consider the web links to and from these sources, and the page views of those sources. We then match the influential people to their alma maters and institutions of employment, so that their influence is attributed to those schools. Our machine-learning Influence Ranking algorithm produces a numerical score of academic achievements, merits, and citations across Wikipedia, wikidata, Crossref, Semantic Scholar and an ever-growing body of data. If you are interested in exploring how and why we rank by influence, explore our methodology in more depth.

There are 47 affordable colleges and universities in New York with stated tuitions and fees under $20,000/year. The following list of the most affordable colleges and universities in New York is composed entirely of schools offering bachelor’s degree programs, have stated tuition and fees near or under the national average of $16,000/year, and are fully accredited colleges.

If affordability and budgeting throughout your college journey is a priority to you, check out our guide to budgeting for college students.