A Completely Different College Ranking Guide

By The Editors, Washington Monthly. Posted September 4, 2006.

A year ago, we decided we'd had enough of laying into U.S. News & World Report for shortcomings in its college guide. If we were so smart, maybe we should produce a college guide of our own. So we did. (We're that smart.) We've produced a second guide this year -- our rankings for national universities and liberal arts colleges -- and it's fair to ask: Is our guide better than that of U.S. News?

Well, it's certainly different. U.S. News aims to provide readers with a yardstick by which to judge the "best" schools, ranked according to academic excellence. Now, we happen to think U.S. News and similar guides do a lousy job of actually measuring academic excellence (see "Is Our Students Learning?"). But the aim of such guides is a perfectly worthy one. Higher education is a huge investment, and parents and students have a right to know whether their hard-earned tuition dollars will be well spent.

But isn't it just as important for taxpayers to know whether their money -- in the form of billions of dollars in research grants and student aid -- is being put to good use? After all, when colleges are doing what they should, they benefit all of us. They undertake vital research that drives our economy. They help Americans who are poor to become Americans who will prosper. And they shape the thoughts and ethics of the young Americans who will soon be leading the country. It's worth knowing, then, which individual colleges and universities fit the bill.

And so, to put The Washington Monthly College Rankings together, we started with a different assumption about what constitutes the "best" schools. We asked ourselves: What are reasonable indicators of how much a school is benefiting the country? We came up with three: how well it performs as an engine of social mobility (ideally helping the poor to get rich rather than the very rich to get very, very rich), how well it does in fostering scientific and humanistic research, and how well it promotes an ethic of service to country. We then devised a way to measure and quantify these criteria (See "A Note on Methodology"). Finally, we placed the schools into rankings. Rankings, we admit, are never perfect, but they're also indispensable.

By devising a set of criteria different from those of other college guides, we arrived at sharply different results. Top schools sank, and medium schools rose. For instance, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, 48th on the U.S News list, takes third place on our list, while Princeton, first on the U.S. News list, takes 43rd on ours. In short, Pennsylvania State, measured on our terms -- by the yardstick of fostering research, national service and social mobility -- does a lot more for the country than Princeton.

Don't get us wrong. We're not saying Princeton isn't a superb school. It employs many of the nation's finest minds, and its philosophy department is widely considered the best in the country. Its eating clubs, or whatever they're called, are surely unmatched. Princeton may be a great destination for your tuition dollars, all 31,450 of them, not including room or board. But what if it's a lousy destination for your tax dollars? Each year, Princeton receives millions of dollars in federal research grants. Does it deserve them? What has Princeton done for us lately? This is the only guide that tries to tell you. That, and a bit more.

The Findings

This year, once again, top-tier schools on the U.S. News chart fare much worse on our list. State schools are, by our measure, the primary heroes of higher education in the United States today. There are also a few villains to make it interesting. Here are some highlights from this year:

The U.S. News top 10 rarely cracks our top 10.

Of the top 10 national universities in the 2006 rankings of U.S. News, only two, Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, make it onto our top 10. Harvard, first with Princeton on the U.S. News list, occupies only 28th place on our list, mainly because it's weak on national service. MIT takes first place, while four state schools take spots two through five: the University of California, Berkeley; Pennsylvania State, University Park; University of California, Los Angeles; and Texas A&M University.

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