The tyranny of prestige.

• Author: Glastris, Paul
• Position: Editor's Note - Editorial - Report

This month we present our third annual Washington Monthly College Guide. As in previous years, our aim is to offer an alternative to the U.S. News & World Report and similar college guides. Those guides focus on what colleges can do for you. We focus on what colleges are doing for the country.

The rankings begin on page 42, and as you'll see, the results diverge sharply from the rankings most of us are used to seeing. Princeton, number one on the U.S. News list, comes in seventy-eighth on ours. Texas A&M, rated sixtieth by U.S. News, is number one on our list.

Surely, you might ask, we don't really think that Texas A&M is better than Princeton? Well, yes, in a way. Remember, we aren't trying, as U.S. News does, to rate how selective or academically prestigious a given school is, but rather how much it contributes to the common good. The whole point is to recognize the broader role colleges and universities play in our national life and to reward those institutions that best fulfill that role. After all, almost every major challenge America now faces--from stagnant wages to the lack of fluent Arab speakers in the federal government--could be met in part by better harnessing the power of our colleges and universities.

So instead of measuring, say, the average SAT scores of incoming freshmen, or the percentage of alumni who donate money, we rank colleges based on three criteria: social mobility, research, and service. In other words, is the school recruiting and graduating low-income students? Is it producing PhDs and cutting-edge research? And is it encouraging in its students an ethic of service? By this yardstick, Texas A&M really does outperform every other university in America (a nose ahead of UCLA and UC Berkeley).

Ah, you might say, isn't academic excellence also an important--arguably the most important--gauge of a school's contribution to the country? Sure it is. And if we could get reliable data about how much learning is going on in American colleges, we'd eagerly include it in our rankings. But we can't: the sound data that does exist, compiled by the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), is kept under wraps by colleges and universities. U.S. News can't get the data either, which is why its editors must resort to statistical alchemy.

And even if we were able to include trustworthy data on academic quality in our rankings, the results would likely still scramble the traditional hierarchy of academic prestige we all carry...