America's best colleges for adult learners.

• Author: Glastris, Paul

NEARLY HALF OF ALL COLLEGE STUDENTS ARE TWENTY-FIVE OR OLDER. YET NO PUBLICATION RANKS THE TOP SCHOOLS FOR THEM--EXCEPT US.

In college, as in life, youth and glamor go together. The top schools on the U.S. News & World Report rankings and similar college lists recruit virtually all of their freshmen right out of high school--or perhaps after a "gap year" spent, say, saving baby sea turtles in Australia.

By contrast, colleges that cater to adult students, the kind with jobs and families, aren't given much attention or credit by the usual gatekeepers. There's never been a good reason for this bias, and it makes even less sense today, when roughly 40 percent of all college students are adults (defined as twenty-five years old or older). Yes, America's young people are our future, as the commencement speakers say. But with rampant income inequality and stagnant wages, our higher education system must also do more to help adults earn the diplomas they need to get ahead.

Unfortunately, the nation's "best" colleges aren't doing their part. They aren't recruiting more adult students or offering them the services they need--like abundant evening and weekend classes to accommodate work and family schedules. And the publications that ignore these shortcomings are part of the problem, not the solution.

That's why last year the Washington Monthly launched a first-of-its-kind ranking of four-year and two-year colleges that do the best job of serving adult learners. We've updated those rankings this year. To create them, we took data from two federal government sources as well as the College Board's Annual Survey of Colleges and combined them into seven general measures of colleges' openness and responsiveness to adult students and to how well those students fared once they left. Our rankings for four-year schools can be found starting on page 28, for two-year schools on page 32, and a detailed methodology on page 36.

The first thing you'll notice in our ranking of four-year universities is the complete absence of Ivy League and other elite private schools. There are also no for-profit colleges on the list (even though 59 percent of their students are adults) other than Walden University in Minnesota (number 93), a private institution organized as a "public benefit corporation." While a few flagship public universities like the University of Iowa (number 11) and University of Texas at Austin (number 61) make the cut, the top 100 is dominated largely by...