Washington Monthly - September/October 2020 - 24

TOP 30

NATIONAL UNIVERSITIES
RANK IN U.S.
NEWS (2020)

1. STANFORD UNIVERSITY (CA)
2. Harvard University (MA)
3. MA Institute of Technology (MA)
4. Yale University (CT)
5. Princeton University (NJ)
6. Duke University (NC)
7. University of Pennsylvania (PA)
8. Georgetown University (DC)
9. University of California-San Diego (CA)*
10. Utah State University (UT)*
11. University of California-Los Angeles (CA)*
12. Texas A&M University-College Station (TX)*
13. University of California-Davis (CA)*
14. Columbia Univ. in the City of NY (NY)
15. University of Florida (FL)*
16. University of Washington-Seattle (WA)*
17. University of California-Berkeley (CA)*
18. University of IL-Urbana-Champaign (IL)*
19. University of NC-Chapel Hill (NC)*
20. University of CA-Santa Barbara (CA)*
21. University of Wisconsin-Madison (WI)*
22. University of California-Irvine (CA)*
23. University of Notre Dame (IN)
24. University of Chicago (IL)
25. Cornell University (NY)
26. CA State University-Fresno (CA)*
27. University of California-Riverside (CA)*
28. University of Virginia (VA)*
29. University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (MI)*
30. Northwestern University (IL)
*Public institution

6
2
3
3
1
10
6
24
37
254
20
70
39
3
34
62
22
48
29
34
46
36
15
6
17
211
91
28
84
9

The 2020 U.S. News rankings were released in September 2019.

on our list), Brown (37), and Johns Hopkins (54). There
are differences, too, in the liberal arts category. Berea
College, ranked third on our list, is 46th on U.S. News's.
St. Mary's College of Maryland, number 29 on our list, is
number 92 on theirs.
There's a simple explanation for these divergences: The two magazines are, in many ways, not measuring
the same things. U.S. News relies on such metrics as student SAT/ACT scores, alumni donations, and the results
of a survey it conducts of academics and administrators,
asking them to gauge the reputations of their peer institutions. These aren't bad measures if you're an upperincome family trying to get your kid into a fancy school.
None of this data, however, factors into the Washington
Monthly's rankings, because we don't think it's relevant
to the question we're asking, which is this: Which colleges
24 September/October 2020

deliver the best results for taxpayers-who invest more
than $150 billion annually in student financial aid-and
for typical students, especially those who are minorities,
the first in their family to attend college, or of modest
means?
Instead, the Washington Monthly's rankings are based
on data U.S. News incorporates barely or not at all. These
include the net price a school charges lower-income families (part of our social mobility category), how many of its
students go on to get PhDs (part of our research category), and the degree to which it encourages its students to
vote (part of our service category).
The most noteworthy overlap between our lists and
U.S. News's is at the tippy top-the Stanfords, Harvards,
and Yales of the country. These universities are not only
prestigious and selective. They also provide generous financial aid to the lower-income students they admit. The
operative phrase, however, is "lower-income students they
admit"-because they don't admit many. For purposes of
comparison, consider the University of Florida, ranked
15th on the Monthly's rankings. Last year UF graduated
more low-income students receiving Pell Grants than did
Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Yale, Princeton, and Duke combined. (It is also the seventh-biggest producer of science and
engineering PhDs in the country and gets a near-perfect
score for its support of student voting.) And it manages
this extraordinary feat without the kind of huge endowments that the Ivy League schools use to fund their student aid packages-endowments larger than the GDP of
many countries. So while the elite schools deserve kudos
for generosity toward their lower-income students, their
model of financing-graduate students who go on to insanely lucrative careers in investment banking and then
kick back a portion of their outsized gains to the university-isn't exactly admirable, or remotely replicable.

his gets at a larger point: The system in which colleges are forced to operate-and that the U.S. News
rankings both reflect and enable-is rigged in favor
of the wealthy and well connected, and that system has to
change, for the good of the country.
You can see this most clearly in the fate of many
small, private nonprofit schools that aren't havens for
wealthy students. Hiram College of Ohio, for instance,
has a proud history-President James Garfield was an
alum-and performs well on our rankings. It ranks third
on our bachelor's colleges list, in part for enrolling large
numbers of first-generation college students and sending
them off to PhD programs and the Peace Corps. But Hiram has also struggled financially. In 2014, deep in debt,
it dropped several majors, including art history, and added more in-demand ones, like sports medicine. It also recently cut its tuition in an effort to attract more students.
While these tough but necessary moves helped, the pandemic again throws its future into question.

Washington Monthly - September/October 2020

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