INTRODUCTION: A DIFFERENT KIND OF COLLEGE RANKING: AMERICA NEEDS A NEW DEFINITION OF HIGHER EDUCATION EXCELLENCE, ONE THAT MEASURES WHAT COLLEGES DO FOR THEIR COUNTRY, INSTEAD OF FOR THEMSELVES.

• Author: Carey, Kevin

A year ago, the nation was tantalizingly close to making college tuition-free for millions of students. The Biden administration's ambitious domestic policy agenda included a free community college plan that bore a more-than-passing resemblance to ideas first proposed right here in the Washington Monthly. America's fragmented and increasingly unaffordable higher education system would finally offer a zero-price public option to all.

Sadly, it was not to be. Fifty Republicans and two Democrats in the U.S. Senate decided to stand athwart progress and reject the opportunity to improve child care, education, paid leave, and much more. The community college plan was among the first items to be jettisoned, in no small part because the wealthy private universities that dominate the D.C. higher education lobby conspicuously failed to endorse it, while also conducting a behind-the-scenes whisper campaign in Congress letting influential members know they'd be happy to see it fail.

Not coincidentally, many of those legislative assassins routinely top the college rankings published annually by a last-century former newsmagazine that shall remain unnamed. When your status depends on rejecting as many applicants as possible while sitting on an enormous pile of money that accumulates earnings nearly tax-free, you tend to look down on efforts to redirect attention and public funding toward colleges that enroll and teach all kinds of people at a reasonable price.

The resulting harm has been enormous, particularly as community college students struggle to reengage with their course work in the wake of devastating pandemic disruptions. As Jodie Kirshner writes in this issue ("The Memphis Post-COVID Community College Blues," page 35), the combination of special interest pleading and ideological obstructionism that doomed the Biden plan came just as two-year colleges were bleeding enrollment, almost surely widening the income and educational attainment gaps that are increasingly pushing society apart.

America needs a different definition of higher education excellence, one that empowers public institutions at the expense of elites, instead of the other way around. One that measures what colleges do for their country, instead of for themselves. That's the philosophy behind the Washington Monthly's annual college rankings. Instead of rating colleges by wealth, fame, and exclusivity, we prize social mobility, public service, and research.

The other rankings elevate colleges for keeping low-income students out. Ours reward them for letting those students in, and then helping them graduate with degrees that lead to good jobs, without unmanageable debt. Instead of reputational surveys that mostly measure the vague and long-ago, we focus on hard numbers: research...