Colleges That Get it Right

Washington Monthly. Posted August 25, 2005.

This month, U.S. News & World Report releases its annual rankings of colleges. First published in 1983, the guide has become its own mini-event: College presidents, education reporters, alumni, parents, and high school juniors alike all scramble to get their hands on the rankings. Its release is followed by weeks of gloating from the top-ranked schools and grumbling from those schools that dropped a slot (or 14) from the previous year. Inspired by the popularity, other guides -- from Princeton Review to Peterson's to Kaplan -- have rushed to compete.

College rankings are now so influential that universities and higher-education journals hold regular chin-stroking sessions about whether the numbers-game has too much influence over the way schools behave. New York University's Vice President John Beckman sniffed to the Harvard Crimson this spring that the rankings "are a device to sell magazines that feed on an American fixation with lists," which is precisely what institutions say when they're trying to duck accountability.

There's a good reason for the American fixation with rankings -- if done correctly, they can help tell us what's working and what's not. Of course universities ought to be judged. The key is judging the right things.

All of the existing college rankings have the same aim -- to help overwhelmed parents and students sift through the thousands of colleges and universities in this country by giving them some yardstick for judging the "best" schools. Whether the guides actually do measure academic excellence -- as opposed to, say, academic reputation (not always the same thing) -- is debatable at best.

The publishers of these guides argue that they are providing a valuable consumer service. Parents who will shell out tens of thousands of dollars to put their teenagers through college need to know they are spending their money wisely.

How much more important, then, is it for taxpayers to know that their money -- in the form of billions of dollars of research grants and student aid -- is being put to good use? These are institutions, after all, that produce most of the country's cutting-edge scientific research and are therefore indirectly responsible for much of our national wealth and prosperity. They are the path to the American dream, the surest route for hard-working poor kids to achieve a better life in a changing economy. And they shape, in profound and subtle ways, students' ideas about American society and their place in it.

It seemed obvious to us that these heavily subsidized institutions ought to be graded on how well they perform in these roles, so we created the first annual Washington Monthly College Rankings. While other guides ask what colleges can do for students, we ask what colleges are doing for the country.

Iowa State beats Princeton

The first question we asked was, what does America need from its universities? From this starting point, we came up with three central criteria: Universities should be engines of social mobility, they should produce the academic minds and scientific research that advance knowledge and drive economic growth, and they should inculcate and encourage an ethic of service. We designed our evaluation system accordingly.

Given our very different way of measuring success, we suspected that the marquee schools routinely found at the top of U.S. News's list might not finish at the very top of ours -- but even we were surprised by what the data revealed. Only three schools in the 2006 U.S. News top 10 are among our highest-ranked: MIT, Stanford, and the University of Pennsylvania.

In addition, while the private colleges of the Ivy League dominate most rankings of the nation's best colleges, they didn't dominate ours -- only Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania made our top 10, and Princeton (tied with Harvard for the top slot on U.S. News's current list) was all the way down at #44, a few slots behind South Carolina State University.

Our list was also more heavily populated with first-rate state schools (the University of California system scored particularly well) than that of U.S. News, which has no public universities within its top ten. UCLA finished second in our overall ranking, UC-Berkeley third, Penn State University sixth, Texas A&M seventh, UC-San Diego eighth and the University of Michigan tenth. Each of our highest-rated schools are, by any reasonable national measure, academically serious schools. But they are not the super-elite -- the Harvards and Yales -- that normally dominate lists of the nation's "best" universities.

The schools that topped our list didn't necessarily do so for the reasons you might expect. MIT earned its number one ranking not because of its ground-breaking research (although that didn't hurt), but on the basis of its commitment to national service -- the school ranked #7 in that category, far better than most of its elite peers.

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