Washington Monthly - September/October 2019 - 11

Editor's Note

Paul Glastris

Young Man Goes West
B

a school needs to help lots of non-wealthy students earn
y the time you get around to reading this, my son Adam
and I will be driving his old SUV, stuffed, Clampett- marketable degrees at reasonable prices, produce plenty of
like, with clothes and cooking utensils, from Washington, scholarship and scholars, and encourage its students to become generous and active citizens. If every college did that,
D.C., to Washington State to drop him off for his first year
America would be a more equitable, prosperous, and demat Evergreen State College. When Adam announced that he
ocratic country.
wanted to go there, I was wary. All I knew about Evergreen
The good news is that our new definition of quality is
was that it was nearly 3,000 miles away and the type of
ultra-left campus that keeps Fox News producers em- gaining traction. More and more colleges are adopting inployed. (In 2017, protests against a professor who ques- novative approaches to help students of modest means succeed (see Eric Cortellessa, "Start Spreading the New," page
tioned the tactics of a student racial justice campaign grew
23) and to inspire all of their students to vote (see Daniel
so intense that graduation had to be held off campus.) But
then Adam pointed something else out to me: my own mag- Block, "The Voting Wars Come to Campus," page 28, and
azine lists Evergreen as the number one master's universi- "America's Best Colleges for Student Voting," page 43). Both
political parties are pushing policies aimed at making postty in the country.
secondary education (vocational as well as traditional twoSo, after fifteen years of publishing an alternative set of
college rankings, I have become a customer. This is one rea- and four-year programs) more affordable, and in this issue
son why we launched the rankings in the first place: to pro- we offer a few more ideas-like turning work study into
a pathway for post-college employment (see Grace Gedye,
vide the kind of useful information that students and their
"Putting Work Study to Work," page 32) and letting comparents weren't getting from U.S. News & World Report.
But we also had a larger ambition: to change the way pol- munity colleges award bachelor's degrees (see Mary Alice
icymakers think about what constitutes quality in high- McCarthy and Debra Bragg, "Escaping the Transfer Trap,"
er education. For decades, a school was considered "good" page 36). Even U.S. News is (slowly) moving in the right diif it was exclusive, wealthy, and prestigious-like a coun- rection: last year it added a "social mobility" component to
try club, but with lectures instead of golf. That defini- its otherwise quack rankings system.
The bad news is that the old definition of quality in hightion, which the U.S. News rankings validate and accentuer education still has a profound grip on our collective conate, warps the entire higher education sector. It tempts
ambitious presidents of non-elite colleges to tighten ad- sciousness. That explains the success of the latest higher
ed hustle, one Anne Kim exposes in this issue ("Summer
missions standards, leaving other institutions to educate
the 90-plus percent of students who can't get into selec- of Scam," page 18): elite schools recruiting high school students to sign up for insanely expensive pre-college summer
tive schools but need a college credential to have a shot
programs by implying-or at least doing little to discourat a middle-class income. It encourages state lawmakers
age the belief-that doing so will give them a leg up on the
to pass higher education budgets that result in per-pupil
spending at public research universities, which tend to ca- admissions process. (Spoiler alert: it doesn't.)
The college my son has chosen is not one of those avariter to affluent white students, that is more than twice as
high as community colleges, which disproportionately en- cious elite institutions-which he thinks are overrated and
ridiculous. Evergreen is a funky public liberal arts school
roll low-income and minority students. And it ultimately
that suits him morally and academically (multidisciplinary
leads to the kind of venality we're seeing in the Operation
classes, focus on social justice, strong environmental sciVarsity Blues scandal, where rich parents, panicked at the
ence program), is diverse racially and economically, helps
prospect of having to put a State U sticker on the back of
its students earn degrees that lead to decent-paying jobs,
their Teslas, bribed their kids' ways into elite schools.
We designed the Washington Monthly's college rank- and charges tuition that won't break Dad's bank account. I
ings to have the opposite effect, with metrics that rede- am proud of, and grateful to, Adam for choosing a college
fine what a "good" college is. To score well in our rankings, that precisely fits this magazine's definition of "good."
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Washington Monthly - September/October 2019

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