Washington Monthly has just published its rankings of American colleges and universities. Its rankings differ substantially from the well known US News rankings, and even more substantially from the strange Forbes ones I discussed in a recent post. It’s easy to see why the three sets of rankings differ so much: the three organizations employ very dissimilar criteria.
The Washington Monthly rankings are an attempt to score schools according to their “contribution to the public good,” on three dimensions: social mobility (recruiting and graduating low-income students), research (producing cutting-edge scholarship and Ph.D.s), and service (encouraging students to give something back to their country). The social mobility rankings combine data on the percentage of a school’s students who are receiving Pell Grants and the annual minus the “predicted” graduation rate. The research dimension ranks are built from data on the school’s total research expenditures, percentage of B.A. students who go on to receive a Ph.D, the number of science and engineering Ph.D.’s awarded adjusted for size, the percentage of faculty receiving significant awards, and the percentage of faculty in national academies. And the service rankings are based on the number of graduates who join the Peace Corps, the number in ROTC, and the amount of federal work-study funds spent on service.
Like the US News and Forbes rankings, Washington Monthly‘s can be questioned and criticized on numerous grounds. Why these criteria? Why not other criteria instead or in addition? Do the indicators really tap the underlying concepts? Does the way the scores were combined make sense? Does the way the dimensions were combined make sense? Why ranks instead of scores?
In any case, here are Washington Monthly‘s ten most highly ranked national universities and its top ten liberal arts colleges:
National universities
1. University of California, Berkeley
2. University of California, San Diego
3. University of California, Los Angeles
4. Stanford
5. Texas A&M
6. South Carolina State (!)
7. Penn State
8. William and Mary
9. University of Texas at Austin
10. University of Californa, Davis
Liberal arts colleges
1. Amherst
2. Mount Holyhoke
3. Williams
4. Harvey Mudd
5. Haverford
6. Smith
7. Bryn Mawr
8. Swarthmore
9. Carleton
10. Wellesley
The full sets of rankings are available online for national universities and for liberal arts colleges. Also available is Washington Monthly’s own brief overview of their results and the biggest surprises. (In the latter category, South Carolina State’s very high ranking among national universities would easily qualify as the biggest surprise. It ireflects the unusually large percentage of its students who are qualified for Pell Grants and the large percentage of its students in ROTC.)
[Hat tip to Chris Deering]