Introduction: a different kind of college ranking.

In the last twelve months, public anxiety about student debt has reached a boiling point. The Occupy protests that began in 2011 included large numbers of unemployed young college graduates with five-figure indentures to the higher education-banking complex. In recent months, total outstanding student loan debt topped $1 trillion, more than Americans owe on credit cards.

Congressional hearings and calls for massive debt forgiveness marked a growing realization that higher education's three-decade binge of tuition hikes--during which college prices tripled after inflation--has degraded the bargain society strikes with its young people. In the not-so-distant past, most undergraduates could rely on a combination of work and parental support to get a bachelor's degree debt free. No longer. Today nearly two-thirds of undergraduates leave college with debt averaging more than $25,000. In more extreme cases, twenty-one-year-olds are burdened with six-figure obligations, in the worst job market in decades.

As a nation, we are inadvertently conducting a grand social experiment in which a new generation of young people is starting life attached to a financial ball and chain. Americans have long looked to higher education as a source of social mobility and public good. Increasingly, it is becoming something much different, and much worse: a narrowing aperture of opportunity through which only the children of the wealthy emerge unscathed.

But you wouldn't know it by reading the latest U.S. News N World Report college rankings. That well-known list actually rewards colleges for spending more money, raising prices, and shutting out all but the most privileged students. While the college cost crisis has many causes, including stingy state legislatures and institutions that have resisted becoming more cost-effective, the relentless chase for status is undeniably driving prices up. There's nothing wrong with rankings per se--colleges need outside scrutiny and students need information to make choices in a complicated market. But rankings that push individual colleges to heedlessly raise prices help precipitate a collective crisis that threatens to undermine institutions that are vital to the nation's future prosperity and civic life.

That's why, since 2005, the Washington Monthly has published rankings that pose a different question: What are colleges doing for the country? After all, higher education matters to more than just the people who attend. We all benefit when university researchers produce groundbreaking research in science, medicine, and technology. We're all affected by the productivity of our knowledge workers and the integrity of our college-educated leaders. And we all pay for it through hundreds of billions of dollars in public subsidies to higher education, costs that are rapidly increasing in response to tuition increases that never seem to end.

The Washington Monthly rankings are based on three factors. The first is social mobility, which gives colleges credit for enrolling many low-income students and helping them earn degrees. The second recognizes research production, particularly at schools whose undergraduates go on to earn PhDs. Third, we value a commitment to service. The more expensive college becomes, the more students are...