A Different Kind of College Ranking

The past year has been one of unceasing turmoil in higher education, with assaults on the fundamental social and economic value of college. Student protesters at Columbia, Harvard, Penn, and other universities received fervent denouncements and praise. The presidents of several of those institutions were called before Congress and two were forced by their boards to resign. Federal courts blocked another Biden administration loan forgiveness plan. Red states defunded diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and put restrictions on the teaching of America’s racial history. Capping all of that were revelations about Project 2025, the conservative road map for a second Trump term, which contains such radical policy prescriptions as closing down the federal Department of Education and privatizing all student loans. A heightened and troubling level of rancor pervades these plans and the wider political conversation about higher education. But the focus of both sides’ attention remains the same.

Time and again, conservatives whip themselves into a fury over phenomena, real or imagined, that predominantly take place in top-ranked universities. The same goes for the so-called liberal elite, whose members think about college primarily through the lens of their venerated alma maters. Consider, for instance, the bitter though legitimate debate over the value of the Gaza war protests that drove the news for months. What’s not debatable, as the Washington Monthly showed with hard numbers in June, is that the protests were largely absent from the open-access schools that most American college students attend. Yet that fact went almost completely unmentioned in media reports and congressional hearings, leaving the impression that the whole of higher education was involved in controversies that were chiefly confined to highly selective universities.

This joint obsession with elite schools is warping our politics by aggravating the large and growing political divide between those with a college education and those without. It is not an exaggeration to say that this divide, which is both a symbol and a cause of broader economic and cultural rifts in society, could determine which party wins control of the federal government in November.

For more on our rankings and the latest in higher education reform news, go to the College Guide section of our website.

We couldn’t have known that higher education would become such a central political issue when we published the first Washington Monthly college rankings in 2005. We were quite sure, however, that the national fixation on a handful of highly selective universities, fed by U.S. News & World Report’s college ranking system, was a crisis in the making. Apex colleges have their place—as training grounds for future leaders, producers of cutting-edge scholarship, and so forth. But the values that define them—how world renowned they are, how much money they raise and spend, how many students they don’t let in—are the opposite of those that should guide the broader system of higher education, where the aim is to make quality college degrees available and affordable to as many people in as many local communities as possible.

We wanted to challenge elite schools to be less self-serving and to elevate in the national conversation the hundreds of humbler colleges and universities that are the backbone of the American higher ed system. These institutions, especially the state-run “regional” universities that are the theme of this year’s college guide, do the noble work of helping low- and middle-income students get the education they need to get ahead in life. These schools also tend to be enmeshed in, and beloved by, their local communities as centers of economic growth and civic life. Yet they are largely unknown outside of their regions.

So, we devised an alternative set of benchmarks for what “excellence” is in higher education, ones that measure what colleges do for their country, instead of for themselves. Rather than reward institutions for their wealth, fame, and exclusivity, we evaluate them on their commitment to three goals: social mobility, research, and public service. We give credit to colleges that welcome students from low- and middle-income backgrounds and get them through college and into good jobs with manageable debt. We use reliable data on research spending and PhD attainment for graduates, rather than the imprecise reputational surveys that other rankings rely on. And we track how colleges encourage their students to be active citizens by voting; serving in the military, Peace Corps, and AmeriCorps; and majoring in socially valuable fields like teaching, health care, and social work. As a result, our rankings highlight the parts of America’s higher education system that the Ivy-focused headlines of the past year, and so many before, have ignored.

The good news is that elite private universities have been feeling the pressure to recruit more students of modest means—and with their endowments exploding in size, they’ve had more than enough resources to cover those students’ costs. As a result, some big-name institutions did well on our rankings this year. Six of the top 11 national universities are Ivies, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford snagged the top two spots. That’s not far from where they landed on U.S. News’s rankings, which also now have a social mobility metric. But that metric makes up such a modest portion of the overall U.S. News score that private colleges that treat lower-income students abysmally also do well. Tulane, Baylor, and Hofstra rank 73rd, 93rd, and 185th on U.S. News’s list of national universities. They come in 429th, 363rd, and 422nd on ours. Not only do they recruit few low-income students and charge them a fortune, but they also produce little scholarly research and fail to prepare their students to engage in their democracy.

On our liberal arts college rankings, Berea College and Harvey Mudd College are again at the top, though they have very different profiles. Kentucky-based Berea is a supercharged engine of social mobility, with excellent earnings, graduation rate, net price, and academic performance for low-income students. Los Angeles–area Harvey Mudd doesn’t bring in nearly as many Pell recipients, but it has excellent research chops and its graduates go on to earn very good money (an average of $123,761 nine years after matriculating) and an unparalleled number of advanced degrees. On the other hand, tony Oberlin College, 51st on the U.S. News liberal arts college list, is down at number 108 on ours. It costs $16,357 a year (making it 87th in net price), brings in only a handful of low-income students, and does a mediocre job of supporting them. Zero—zero—graduates this past year pursued service-oriented majors, and very few entered government service. Oberlin also received no points on our scale of schools’ efforts to get students to vote.

Even if they try, selective private universities and liberal arts colleges can’t help many low-income students get ahead for the simple reason that they educate only 6 percent of all undergraduates. Flagship public universities have more capacity, enrolling 19 percent of all bachelor’s students, and some of them rank near the top of our list this year—kudos to the University of Wisconsin–Madison (12), the University of California, Berkeley (13), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (19). Unfortunately, many other flagship public universities, like the University of Colorado Boulder (109) and the University of Vermont (203), have become more like private universities—exclusive, expensive, and solicitous of wealthy out-of-state and foreign students rather than nonaffluent residents in their own states.

To find the real engines of upward mobility, you need to look lower on the traditional pecking order, to what are called regional public universities. These institutions often have “state” in their name, admit most or all applicants, and are generally not much known nationally. Yet they bestow more than 40 percent of all four-year degrees in America. U.S. News lists only three regional publics among its top 100 national universities. Sixteen make it into the Washington Monthly top 100, including California State University, Fresno (22), Florida Atlantic University (41), and Montclair State (57).

Regional publics also dominate the upper reaches of our bachelor’s and master’s lists. In the former category, fourth-ranked Elizabeth City State, a historically Black university in North Carolina, is number one in offering students a low net price, number six in ROTC participation, and number nine in research expenditures. SUNY Geneseo is the top master’s school for its formidable research and its number one performance in sending grads on to earn PhDs. Meanwhile, the many campuses of the for-profit DeVry University continue to disappoint. The branch in Ontario, California, is ranked 587th among our master’s schools because it charges students $30,000 a year, graduates an abysmal 26 percent of them in eight years, underperforms expected earnings by 25 percent, and sends practically no one on to PhDs.

Regional universities are the real workhorses of higher education. They serve exactly the kind of people that politicians in both parties—but especially Republicans, these days—profess to advocate for: working-class students in search of a practical education that will prepare them for the workforce and a step up the socioeconomic ladder. We’ve long been fans of these unassuming institutions, which have launched the careers of such prominent Americans as Tom Hanks and Tim Walz. Indeed, their virtues and struggles are the thread that runs through all the feature articles in this issue of the magazine.

For one, the teaching is better at regional public universities than at elite institutions, writes Jonathan Zimmerman. That’s because faculty at elite universities get ahead by pursuing research rather than good classroom pedagogy. That said, teaching quality throughout higher education is generally poor and has been for generations—a sorry situation that won’t change, Zimmerman argues, until the federal government puts its muscle and money behind reform.

Regional universities also provide states with an exceptional return on state taxpayer dollars, Zach Marcus reports. Whereas graduates of flagships often leave for jobs in distant cities, those of regional universities typically settle down and build their careers in-state. Yet the regionals typically receive far less public funding than flagships, which wield more political power. And conservative state lawmakers, channeling the outrage over campus “wokeness” their constituents pick up on Fox News, demand cuts to higher ed budgets that hit hardest the regional universities that most benefit their constituents’ kids. 

Because they are seen as lower status, regional universities sometimes try to ape flagships by tightening their admissions standards and devoting more money to research—actions that help them rise in the U.S. News rankings. They almost never lower their institution’s selectivity to serve more students and pour money into programs that meet local needs rather than burnish their national reputations. But that’s exactly what José Luis Cruz Rivera has done at Northern Arizona University. As Jamal Watson writes, Cruz’s early success is turning heads in the higher ed reform world.

Regional universities also offer some of the best returns for the millions of Americans looking to upgrade their careers by going to graduate school. That’s a key finding of a new ranking we are unveiling in this issue, “America’s Best and Worst Master’s Programs.” The other key finding is that the worst returns are offered at some of the country’s most prestigious universities. A master’s degree in nursing from Yale, for instance, will leave you $118,849 in debt, on average, whereas you’ll borrow only $23,302 for the same degree from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley while earning slightly more five years later ($133,871 versus $128,563 for Yalies). Information like this can’t be found on U.S. News’s popular “Best Graduate Schools” guide, because that ranking mostly ignores how much programs cost or how much debt students tend to graduate with. If you want to understand how these elite universities get away with it, read Marc Novicoff’s investigation of the master’s in counseling program at Northwestern University. (Spoiler: It’s because the federal government lets them.)

Another first-of-its-kind ranking we are debuting in this issue, “America’s Best and Worst Colleges for Women in STEM,” tells quite a different story. Elite private universities like Carnegie Mellon and flagships like the University of Washington are the ones doing the best job of reversing women’s underrepresentation in science and technology degrees, while regional public universities are among the biggest laggards. But as Laura Colarusso notes, the high rate of women succeeding in STEM at elite universities takes away the reason other colleges often trot out for their failure: that women aren’t interested or can’t compete with men in these endeavors. If regional universities stop making excuses and up their game, their sheer size means that America could have considerably more female scientists and engineers to meet the economy’s growing demand for such talent.

And finally, Anne Kim reports on another way to improve outcomes for masses of students at unheralded schools: Reform the developmental education classes that so many freshmen get thrown into. Remedial education has long been a kind of limbo for underprivileged or underperforming students; it’s expensive, time consuming, and simply doesn’t work to get the vast majority of students back on track. Proven reform methods do exist, like “corequisite” classes that meet alongside, not in place of, college-level courses. But a decade-old push to put those fixes in place has stalled, Kim writes, and Washington needs to provide an extra push to overcome faculty skepticism and institutional inertia.

There’s clearly room for regional universities to improve their performance, but it would help if we didn’t starve them of funds. On average, regional publics receive about 10 percent fewer state dollars per student than do flagships. They also garner less federal research funding. And they don’t have the kind of gargantuan endowments that elite schools enjoy, because they are in the business of educating average Americans, not people who go into hedge funds and investment banks. If we supported regional universities at anything like the level of elite colleges, there would be considerably more of the former and fewer of the latter in the top 100 of our rankings.

Both sides of the aisle are guilty of ignoring the contributions of regional universities. But they do so for different reasons: liberals, out of ignorance or snobbery; conservatives, because it undermines the populist anti–higher ed agenda. After all, what are regional publics but a huge government-funded program, one that keeps flyover towns afloat while improving millions of working-class Americans’ lives?

Still, it’s possible to break through these sorts of partisan blinders. A few years ago, community colleges and vocational training weren’t high on the national agenda, either. Today, elected officials in both parties talk about them constantly, and at least pretend to want to invest in them. A similar boost in recognition for regional public universities could bring benefits beyond what can be measured in degrees attained and jobs acquired. Voters these days hold almost all institutions in low regard; it’s part of what drives the nihilism of our politics. But all Americans, regardless of party, ought to be proud of what regional universities do every day. Elevating them in the national conversation could go a long way toward bringing us together.

Special thanks to the Lumina Foundation for its support of the college guide and rankings issue and to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Strada Educational Foundation for their support of our general higher education coverage.

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