INTRODUCTION: A DIFFERENT KIND OF COLLEGE RANKING.

• Author: Glastris, Paul

If only for their sheer size, measured in numbers 13 digits long, the two massive spending bills now wending their way through Congress are likely, if passed in anything like their present form, to revamp whole areas of our national life. Not the least of these areas is higher education.

The American Families Plan would invest hundreds of billions of dollars to make community college free, improve graduation rates, increase the size of Pell Grants, and create a new national service program focused on fighting climate change that includes college scholarships for those who complete a year of service. Democrats hope to pass that bill using budget reconciliation to avoid a GOP Senate filibuster. Meanwhile, a bipartisan infrastructure bill budgets tens of billions of new dollars for energy research, much of which will flow into U.S. research universities.

Politics being what it is, either or both bills could bite the dust or be radically scaled back. But if you want to know which specific colleges and universities are likely to benefit most from whatever largess emerges, you could do worse than scan the top rungs of the Washington Monthly's college rankings, which you'll find beginning on page 54 of this issue.

As it has since 2005, the Monthly ranks colleges and universities on three broad criteria: the degree to which they recruit and graduate students of modest means (with Pell Grants as the main data point), produce the scholarship and scholars that drive economic growth and human flourishing (with federal research dollars a central measure), and encourage students to be active citizens (with national and community service participation a key variable). That these criteria line up almost precisely with the new funding priorities of Congress and the Biden administration has lent of late an air of triumphalism to Washington Monthly staff Zoom calls.

Our measures are quite different from those used by a certain other magazine that dominates the college rankings game. That other publication, which shall not be named (though in Spanish it's Noticias de Estados Uni dos e Informe Mundial), rewards colleges for their wealth, prestige, and exclusivity. In so doing, it both reflects and aggravates the higher education sector's increasing tendency to shower resources on students from affluent backgrounds while sending a trickle to those from poor, working-class, and minority families. This exacerbates the racial and class inequality that, as Kevin Carey argues in this issue ("Why Conservatives Hate College," page 18), is tearing the country apart.

The Monthly's rankings, by contrast, are crafted to push institutions of higher learning to be engines of upward mobility, scientific progress, and democratic participation. They are designed, in other words, to reflect what we think most Americans want from the hundreds of billions of...