Introduction: a different kind of college ranking.

• Author: Carey, Kevin

For the last twelve years, the Washington Monthly has published a different kind of college ranking.

Unlike the prestige- and wealth-driven metrics put out by the likes of U.S. News & World Report, our rankings measure what colleges do for their country.

Instead of rewarding colleges for the number of applications they reject, we give them credit for enrolling unusually large numbers of low-income and first-generation students. Instead of assuming that the most expensive schools are also the best, we recognize universities that produce research, train the next generation of scientists and PhDs, and instill their graduates with an ethos of public service.

Our rankings are meant to be more than just a guide for potential students. An educated, enlightened society is a better society, for everyone. We all have a stake in how well our colleges succeed.

To that end, we've called for colleges to release much more information about themselves--in particular, how much their students learn.

And we've seen leaders of both parties, at the highest levels of government, respond. Not long after our first rankings were published, George W. Bush's education secretary, Margaret Spellings, issued a high-profile report calling for colleges to release more information about how well undergraduates are educated, and be accountable for the results.

The Obama administration then developed a "College Scorecard" that shows prospective students how likely they are to get a good job and pay back their loans. When Obama announced an ambitious (though ultimately unfulfilled) effort to tie federal aid to a new college ratings system, the measures he proposed sounded an awful lot like the Monthly rankings. The world was getting better--too slowly, but moving in the right direction.

Then came Trump.

It's hard to know exactly where the president and his education secretary, Betsy DeVos, stand when it comes to making higher education more transparent, accountable, and focused on the best interests of students and citizens. Neither are distinguished in the collegiate and policymaking fields.

Trump, of course, infamously ran a grifty real estate seminar disguised as an eponymous university and said, "I love the poorly educated!" because the degree-less were more likely to give him votes. DeVos is a free market ideologue from the world of K-12 schools. She has chosen not to fill the most important higher education position in her department, the undersecretary of education. Her most significant actions to date have involved rolling back Obama regulations designed to protect students from predatory for-profit schools (see Stephen Burd, "Borrower's Remorse," p. 76) and campus sexual assault.

Which is a shame, because our 2017 rankings show promise and peril in equal measure. There are still colleges and universities, most of them public, making fantastic contributions to the public good. But there are also schools, some of them prestigious and conventionally well regarded, that appear to be little more than expensive sorting machines for the already privileged. They're inward-facing places that spend their resources mostly on themselves.

Here are highlights of what we found.

National Universities

While the U.S...