Via Urs and other suspects, the new US News College Rankings are out, prompting another round of disparaging remarks about the impact of such rankings on trivial things such as learning. The center-left Washington Monthly has countered with its own set of rankings.
Not surprisingly, the major winners in the Washington Monthly rankings are top tier state schools, several of which clawed their way into the top thirty at the expense of tier-1B private schools. Meanwhile, SUNY-Ithaca is well ahead of both New Haven State University and UMass-Cambridge, while the article goes to great lengths to disparage Nowhere New Jersey University on several fronts. Brown is unmentioned.
A couple of points, in no particular order:
The three components of the Monthly's rankings are research contributions, social mobility, and "national service". The Monthly measures service by the rate at which federal work study grants go to students in community service jobs, student enrollment in ROTC, and alumni enrollment in the Peace Corps. Peacenik schools such as Brown have yet to revive their ROTC program, and as the magazine's 2001 article shows, many schools have continued to use work study grants to turn their students into indentured servants.
Likewise, the Monthly's focus on research quality ignores high quality programs in the humanities and social sciences. I would imagine that administrators at Northwestern are okay with spending less money on their science and engineering departments to preserve their top-notch journalism program, and Georgetown probably enjoys being the center of the political science universe. The much-maligned Princeton is also probably happy to have Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou on the faculty, as well as Andrew Wiles, who while not coming up with anything that's worth any money, at least proved Fermat's Last Theorem. That has to count for something, right?
I think it's a good thing that so many top-notch state schools are featured prominently in the Monthly's rankings, and it confirms my hypothesis that the difference between a good state school and a mid-tier private school is minimal. In fact, committed students are probably better off going to the state school, where their eagerness to learn may make it easier for them to stand out from their peers.
Finally, where can I get the complete list?
In other college news, the average tuition at four year colleges is up quite a bit, which may have something to do with the increase in public school quality over the past decade. UGA is now a respectable school, Michigan and UT-Austin are on par with almost any private school in the country, and several other state schools like UCSD and Wisconsin have been rapidly climbing the ladder. The only mystery to me is why Illlinois and Penn State have failed to keep up.
