Rethinking College Rankings

U.S. News and World Report has been generating college rankings for over 20 years. Many have criticized the rankings as both superficial and tilted towards elite institutions. Conservatives have produced rival college guilds designed to help students avoid liberal professors. There has not been a progressive alternative until now.

“And so, to put The Washington Monthly College Rankings together, we started with a different assumption about what constitutes the "best" schools. We asked ourselves: What are reasonable indicators of how much a school is benefiting the country? We came up with three: how well it performs as an engine of social mobility (ideally helping the poor to get rich rather than the very rich to get very, very rich), how well it does in fostering scientific and humanistic research, and how well it promotes an ethic of service to country. We then devised a way to measure and quantify these criteria (See "A Note on Methodology"). Finally, we placed the schools into rankings. Rankings, we admit, are never perfect, but they're also indispensable.

By devising a set of criteria different from those of other college guides, we arrived at sharply different results. Top schools sank, and medium schools rose. For instance, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, 48th on the U.S News list, takes third place on our list, while Princeton, first on the U.S. News list, takes 43rd on ours. In short, Pennsylvania State, measured on our terms -- by the yardstick of fostering research, national service and social mobility -- does a lot more for the country than Princeton.”

I haven’t read the entire study, but it looks very promising. Their definition of the best schools makes a lot of sense to me. By gauging the total benefit for the country, this list seems to value education as a tool for building a functioning society rather than a simple mechanism to get rich.