Washington Monthly - September/October 2021 - 15

INTRODUCTION:
A DIFFERENT KIND
OF COLLEGE RANKING
By Paul Glastris
I
f only for their sheer size, measured in numbers 13 digits
long, the two massive spending bills now wending their
way through Congress are likely, if passed in anything
like their present form, to revamp whole areas of our national
life. Not the least of these areas is higher education.
The American Families Plan would invest hundreds
of billions of dollars to make community college free, improve
graduation rates, increase the size of Pell Grants,
and create a new national service program focused on
fighting climate change that includes college scholarships
for those who complete a year of service. Democrats
hope to pass that bill using budget reconciliation to
avoid a GOP Senate filibuster. Meanwhile, a bipartisan
infrastructure bill budgets tens of billions of new dollars
for energy research, much of which will flow into U.S. research
universities.
Politics being what it is, either or both bills could
bite the dust or be radically scaled back. But if you want
to know which specific colleges and universities are likely
to benefit most from whatever largess emerges, you
could do worse than scan the top rungs of the Washington
Monthly's college rankings, which you'll find beginning
on page 54 of this issue.
As it has since 2005, the Monthly ranks colleges and
universities on three broad criteria: the degree to which
they recruit and graduate students of modest means
(with Pell Grants as the main data point), produce the
scholarship and scholars that drive economic growth and
human flourishing (with federal research dollars a central
measure), and encourage students to be active citizens
(with national and community service participation
a key variable). That these criteria line up almost precisely
with the new funding priorities of Congress and the
Biden administration has lent of late an air of triumphalism
to Washington Monthly staff Zoom calls.
Our measures are quite different from those used
by a certain other magazine that dominates the college
rankings game. That other publication, which shall not
be named (though in Spanish it's Noticias de Estados Unidos
e Informe Mundial), rewards colleges for their wealth,
prestige, and exclusivity. In so doing, it both reflects and
aggravates the higher education sector's increasing tendency
to shower resources on students from affluent
backgrounds while sending a trickle to those from poor,
working-class, and minority families. This exacerbates
the racial and class inequality that, as Kevin Carey argues
in this issue ( " Why Conservatives Hate College, " page
18), is tearing the country apart.
The Monthly's rankings, by contrast, are crafted to
push institutions of higher learning to be engines of upward
mobility, scientific progress, and democratic parFor
more on our rankings and the latest in
higher education reform news, go to the
College Guide section of our website, at
washingtonmonthly.com/2021-college-guide
ticipation. They are designed, in other words,
to reflect
what we think most Americans want from the hundreds
of billions of tax dollars that flow annually into
those schools.
T
he very different yardsticks of the two magazines lead
to quite different results. For instance, 17 of the top
30 schools on our national universities list are public.
In the other magazine's, 25 of the top 30 national universities
are elite private ones. The public universities on our list
range from prestigious flagships like University of California,
Berkeley, to schools that don't even make the other publication's
top 50-such as University of Minnesota Twin Cities
(20 on ours, 66 on theirs) and Iowa State University (27
on ours, 118 on theirs).
You'll find similar discrepancies in the liberal arts
category. The College of Saint Benedict, a small women's
college outside Saint Cloud, Minnesota, is 18 on our liberal
arts ranking and 96 on theirs. Beloit College in Wisconsin,
number 27 on our list, is number 80 on theirs.
Washington Monthly 15
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021college-guide
Washington Monthly - September/October 2021

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