Probably most anyone who attended a college not in the top rankings would answer that one in the negative. It might lead to a better job via the prestige of the school, but is the education necessarily better? That’s a question discussed by David Cohen in his education blog:

Hard on the heels of its eye-popping survey of stratospherically priced kindergartens, business magazine Forbes plays academic globocop with its listing of the world’ “most expensive” universities.

But don’t expect to see lofty institutions in the Swiss Alps or the endowment-lavished Ivy League citadels of America’s elite, or even the colleges of Oxbridge. These institutions, for the most part, are as relatively unknown internationally as they are pricey. Taking a cue from another recent survey of four-year academic institutions within the US, the magazine has considered only the affordability of an undergraduate degree.

According to Forbes, the world’s costliest college is George Washington University in Washington, DC, where the tuition price tag for the current academic year clocks in at $39,240. The next four, all American, are Ohio’s Kenyon College ($38,140 per year, says Forbes), Bucknell University in Pennsylvania ($38,134), New York’s Vassar College ($38,115) and Sarah Lawrence College ($38,090).