The Washington Monthly college guide: other guides ask what colleges can do for you. We ask what colleges are doing for the country.

By The Editors

In late summer, 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 (see "Broken Ranks," by Amy Graham and Nicholas Thompson, September 200l). 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 arc 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 arc 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 mid 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 set out to create the first annual Washington Monthly College Rankings. While other guides ask what colleges can do for students, we ask what colleges arc 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. (See "A Note on Methodology," p. 26.)

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. New stop ten 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 ten, and Princeton (tied with Harvard for the top slot on U.S. News's list last year) 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. Similarly,

UCLA, which finished second on our overall list, excelled in research and came in first in our social mobility rating because of its astoundingly high graduation rate given its large number of lower-income students. (Schools in the University of California's system were consistently high performers in this area: UCLA took top honors, with UC--San Diego, UC--Davis, UC--Berkeley, and UC--Riverside not far behind.) At the same time, Princeton finished behind schools such as the University of Arizona and Iowa State--schools with which it probably does not often consider itself to be in competition--not just because of its comparatively low research numbers, which are perhaps to be expected given that the university doesn't have a medical school and considers its mission to be teaching, not research. What really did in Princeton were mediocre scores on national service and social mobility, categories in which it should have excelled.

Other priorities

Princeton's comparatively low ranking is evidence of something else indicated by our numbers. Schools that are similar in size, prestige, and endowment end up in very different places on The Washington Monthly College Rankings, largely because of decisions they have made about how to prioritize their resources or focus their energies. When it comes to social mobility for instance, Harvard has the lowest percentage of Pell Grant recipients in its student body of any school in the country By comparison, Columbia, whose institutional ambitions and prestige are similar to Harvard's, has twice as many lower-income students as its counterpart on the Charles River; Cornell has nearly three times the number. Public universities provide some equally interesting data: Both Indiana University and the University. of Virginia are the most elite public institutions in states with populations of roughly similar wealth, yet the percentage of IU students who arc Pell Grant recipients is nearly twice that of UVa.

On research, as well, the results are interesting. The big state schools finished somewhat higher than we had expected, and the super-elite schools (the Cal Techs and Harvards) fell somewhat lower. Even so, we were caught off -guard by some of the top finishers, including University of California's San Diego campus. UCSD is not normally considered among the elite UC campuses--UCLA and UC-Berkeley have that distinction--much less top-tier national schools. But it has quietly rounded up a formidable team of scholars. Nine Nobelists are on faculty at UCSD (Dartmouth, by comparison, has none), and the National Research Council recently ranked its Oceanography, Neurosciences, Physiology, and Bioengineering departments either first or second in the country. This concentration of talent translates into direct benefits for the surrounding community: Forty percent of the companies in San Diego's biotech corridor are spin-offs of research based at UCSD. These accomplishments landed UCSD in the sixth slot for research grants, and eighth on the overall rankings.

Perhaps the most striking data, however, is found in national service. Our measures here were simple: whether a school devotes a significant part of its federal work study funding to placing students in community service jobs (as the original work study law intended); the percentage of students enrolled ha ROTC; and the percentage of graduates currently enrolled in the Peace Corps. All schools, large and small, are capable of excelling ha these areas. In fact, we found that while some very small and nationally unknown schools have made an aggressive commitment to national service, most of the highest ranking U.S. News schools have not. The University of Portland, for example, finishes first in national service while Harvard lingers down at #75. Harvard obviously has far more resources than the University, of Portland, and there's no question that it could match Portland's remarkable performance on service if it chose to make a similar commitment to emphasizing those values among its students. But, at least by the criteria we set, it has not.

These service results haven't changed much since the first time we rated colleges on their commitment to national service (see "The Other College Rankings," by Joshua Green, Jan/Feb. 2002). But there's one nice surprise: MIT leaped from near the bottom of the pack three years ago to near the top today.

We created a separate ranking for the nation's liberal arts colleges, and our results there confirmed these general trends. Some of the schools at the top of our list--including Wellesley and Bryn Mawr--are considered among the nation's most elite liberal arts colleges. But some schools we didn't expect--Wofford College, #8--or had simply never heard of--Presbyterian College, #13--crept into top slots. Though research rankings for both Presbyterian and Wofford were comparatively low, both schools produced extremely strong numbers...

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