INTRODUCTION: A DIFFERENT KIND OF COLLEGE RANKING.

• Author: Carey, Kevin

The carnival of corruption and deceit that is the Operation Varsity Blues college admissions scandal has created many windows onto the sorry state of American higher education, and of American society at large. How the rich and powerful, unsatisfied with the enormous and growing advantages of our winner-take-all society, bribed and cheated to take even more. How athletic coaches simply diverted graft money normally claimed by college "development" officials into their own pockets. How the market price of an elite admissions slot can reach upward of $6 million, based on what one wealthy Chinese family was willing to pay.

But the core truth exposed by the FBI is even more disturbing. The sheer venality of the scandal is the inevitable consequence of a higher education system unmoored from any honest appraisal of how well colleges help students learn.

Finding and publicizing such information is one of the Washington Monthly College Guide's prime directives. Over the last fifteen years, we've steadily added new data to our rankings of what colleges do for their country by promoting social mobility, research, and public service. That perspective, unlike the wealth- and status-obsessed rankings published by U.S. News & World Report, creates a very different definition of excellence.

It's not surprising, for example, that no B-list celebrities were arrested for bribing their children into Utah State University, our fourteenth-ranked national university: it already admits 89 percent of students who apply. We rank Utah State so high because it's very good at helping low-income students graduate and get good jobs. It was not designed to exclude people, which is why it doesn't even crack the top 200 at U.S. News.

Nor did any venture capitalist financiers pay off a test proctor to wangle their progeny into Cedar Crest College of Pennsylvania, our fifth-ranked master's-granting university, which does a great job of promoting civic engagement and sending its graduates into the Peace Corps and PhD programs. Few of its students appear to be partying on yachts during spring break or getting paid to promote branded products on Instagram. And we can be sure that nobody Photoshopped the head of their weakling spawn onto the body of a champion water polo player in order to fake their way into Berea College, which ranks fourth on our list of liberal arts colleges. Berea, which has a historical mission of serving first-generation students from Appalachia, doesn't have a water polo team--or crew, or sailing, or fencing, or any of the other rich-people sports that upper-crust families have long used as the so-called "side door" into coveted schools.

Instead, those families set their sights on the University of Southern California, which saw the greatest number of employees implicated by the cheating scandal and--perhaps not coincidentally!--has produced a remarkably diverse collection of lurid improprieties in recent years. There's the former dean of the USC medical school, a then-practicing eye surgeon, who spent many of his hours holed up in hotel rooms smoking meth with a prostitute. And the dean of the social work school, who pioneered the creation of a...