Young Man Goes West.

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

By the time you get around to reading this, my son Adam and I will be driving his old SUV, stuffed, Clampett-like, with clothes and cooking utensils, from Washington, D.C., to Washington State to drop him off for his first year at Evergreen State College. When Adam announced that he wanted to go there, I was wary. All I knew about Evergreen was that it was nearly 3,000 miles away and the type of ultra-left campus that keeps Fox News producers employed. (In 2017, protests against a professor who questioned the tactics of a student racial justice campaign grew so intense that graduation had to be held off campus.) But then Adam pointed something else out to me: my own magazine lists Evergreen as the number one master's university in the country.

So, after fifteen years of publishing an alternative set of college rankings, I have become a customer. This is one reason why we launched the rankings in the first place: to provide the kind of useful information that students and their parents weren't getting from U.S. News & World Report.

But we also had a larger ambition: to change the way policymakers think about what constitutes quality in higher education. For decades, a school was considered "good" if it was exclusive, wealthy, and prestigious--like a country club, but with lectures instead of golf. That definition, which the U.S. News rankings validate and accentuate, warps the entire higher education sector. It tempts ambitious presidents of non-elite colleges to tighten admissions standards, leaving other institutions to educate the 90-plus percent of students who can't get into selective schools but need a college credential to have a shot at a middle-class income. It encourages state lawmakers to pass higher education budgets that result in per-pupil spending at public research universities, which tend to cater to affluent white students, that is more than twice as high as community colleges, which disproportionately enroll low-income and minority students. And it ultimately leads to the kind of venality we're seeing in the Operation Varsity Blues scandal, where rich parents, panicked at the prospect of having to put a State U sticker on the back of their Teslas, bribed their kids' ways into elite schools.

We designed the Washington Monthly's college rankings to have the opposite effect, with metrics that redefine what a "good" college is. To score well in our rankings, a school needs to help lots of non-wealthy students earn marketable...