‘Washington Monthly’ Ranks Colleges

The editors of The Washington Monthly published their own college guide this year, which ranks institutions using entirely different criteria.

“While other guides ask what colleges can do for students, we ask what colleges are doing for the country,” write the editors in the September issue of the publication, a political magazine based in the nation’s capital.

Rather than asking institutions to complete a survey form, as U.S. News does, the monthly relied on publicly available data. It calculated each college’s score for community service, based on the percentage of federal work-study funds used for community-service projects.

It also calculated scores for social mobility, which it figured by calculating the graduation rate of low-income students on Pell Grants, and scores for research, which it measured based both on the amount of research spending and the number of doctorates awarded in the hard sciences.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology earned the top spot in the monthly’s rankings, based largely on its performance in the community-service category. Harvard and Princeton Universities, which shared the top spot in the U.S. News rankings, were 16th and 44th, respectively. The monthly magazine ranked Wellesley College first among liberal-arts colleges.

The monthly also had more “first-rate state schools” finish at the top of the heap than did U.S. News, with the University of California system faring particularly well, the editors said.

http://chronicle.com Section: Students Volume 52, Issue 2, Page A48