790: How to Develop an Engaged Campus that Prepares Students for Citizenship - with Paul Glastris, Editor in Chief, Washington Monthly

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Welcome back everybody. It's your time to EdUp on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. And we've been doing that over 700 times, over 340,000 listens as the EdUp Experience approaches four years of age in January, 2024. I can't believe it. And if you can believe it, I still podcast every day on my lunch. I stand up from my day job, I podcast with amazing leaders and then I go right back to work. But that's the sacrifice we make. And Elvin Freitas, of course, co-founder of the EdUp Experience, he edits these episodes in his bathroom in his two-bedroom apartment in New York City after his wife and kids go to sleep. That's when we do all the magic and the editing to the EdUp Experience. 

You know that we put out a book called "Commencement: The Beginning of a New Era in Higher Education" last year about this time. It has so far sold thousands of copies across the United States as we interviewed 125 college and university presidents who told us about the future. And we put it all into a book. You can pick that up on Amazon anytime you like.

Of course, if you want to find us on the road and be a part of the EdUp Experience live, well, we're going to be in Philadelphia at the Middle States Commission for Higher Education in Philly December 4th through 6th of 2023. And then Elvin, my co-founder of the EdUp Experience podcast, on November 28 and 29 will be in Doha, Qatar at the World Innovation Summit for Education. He'll be podcasting live from Doha. So we'll be out on the road. You guys can find us and we'll always have an open mic for anybody that wants to sit down and talk about future higher ed.

One person that I know wants to talk about higher education, of course, is my guest today. And I think I canceled on him once, maybe twice. And then he sent me a message: "Don't fail me again." And I haven't. In fact, we're here to record this episode. And so there won't be a third cancellation. We'll only have a celebration. Ladies and gentlemen, my guest today, he's your guest today. Here he is. His name is Paul Glastris. He is the editor-in-chief at the Washington Monthly. Paul, what's going on?

Paul Glastris: Joe, I'm great and glad to be here.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: We're glad to have you. OK, so let's set the stage. Washington Monthly, you've been there a short period of time, right? Just a short period of time. Talk about your background and how you came into Washington Monthly. How did you get into journalism? Tell us the story.

Paul Glastris: Well, I grew up not far from you in St. Louis County, Missouri, and went to two colleges that have some of the best journalism programs in the country, Mizzou and Northwestern. Never took a journalism course. Honestly, got into it after I got out of college, but have loved it ever since and have been doing this for more than 20 years as editor of the Washington Monthly. But I did a 10-year stint at U.S. News and World Report, which has the sort of dominant college ranking system. And so left that after 10 years with maybe an idea of doing something a little different.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: That is amazing. So Washington Monthly since the early 2000s. And, you know, as you said, the U.S. News & World Report, when people think about college rankings for better or for worse, that's one of the areas that they think about. Of course, Forbes has also put out college rankings and now the Washington Monthly has its own ranking system. And you know, it's interesting and you know, there's a lot of question about the validity of a college ranking. What does it mean? How do you, what goes into it? I actually interviewed the chief strategist, data strategist at U.S. News and World Report and I came out more confused than I went in on what, you know, makes a school better than or worse than another. Can you talk about the rankings at the Washington Monthly? What made you decide to go into the college ranking area coming off of working for U.S. News & World Report? And how are the rankings different?

Paul Glastris: So I worked for U.S. News and World Report, and then I spent two and a half years as a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton. You know, education was a major part of his agenda when I was there. And then when I came to the Washington Monthly, we ran a couple of investigative pieces about U.S. News' ranking system and came away - and I really wasn't thinking about this when I was at U.S. News, I was out in the field doing my own thing. But the more we kind of looked at it, the more we thought it really doesn't add up. The theory of their rankings doesn't make a lot of sense. This is lunacy. They're trying to measure what excellence is, but they're defining excellence as schools that, to kind of boil it down, are exclusive, privileged and wealthy. And from our point of view, that's not what we think most people want out of the higher education system. 

Their idea of a great college is a college that is kind of like a country club, right? Really nice rooms, really nice amenities, nice food and, you know, lectures instead of golf. And most people would love to go to such a thing as most people like to have a country club, but most people don't have a chance to go to that. They go to schools and they go to them in order to get good educations, to put them on a path to number one, getting a decent income and number two, doing something that means something to them.

And so we built an alternative set of rankings that instead of wealth, prestige and exclusivity, we look at upward mobility, research and service. Upward mobility - does the college recruit and graduate students who are not wealthy with degrees that are reasonably priced and bring a good return in the marketplace? Research - are they creating the scholarship and the scholars that drive economic growth and human flourishing? And service - are they encouraging their students to be active citizens, to give back to their country and community, to vote and so forth? And we think that's kind of what voters want when they contemplate what they want out of the hundreds of millions of dollars that subsidize higher education. And it's probably what they want for themselves if they go to college. 

And the problem with the U.S. News methodology is not only is it focused on elites rather than average people, but if all colleges compete to rise on the U.S. News ranking, then we get more colleges going after more wealthy kids and ignoring everybody else. Right, college becomes what it has become, let's be honest. Higher education system is supposed to be a machine for creating greater economic equality, giving more people a chance to live a decent life. And it's become a machine to create inequality. So that's what happens if colleges compete to go higher on U.S. News. If they compete to go higher on the Washington Monthly rankings, we get better education at a more reasonable price for more people, a broader middle class. We get more of the innovations that can help the country grow economically and solve our big problems like climate change. And we have citizens who are more engaged in their democracy and giving something back. So good things happen if all the colleges compete on our rankings.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I love it. I love what you said. You're so right. The more you compete to move up a ranking system, you're generally excluding more people to show less people with a higher result, whatever that result might be, which gets you deeper or more positive on a category that matters less to the people you've excluded and only to those that you've included. It creates exclusivity as you move up those rankings, right? And to your point, if you really want to talk about impact there's a difference between being on a listing and impact. Upward mobility might be one of those things that we just don't talk enough about from those that you are including if you choose to do so because you could choose to exclude and I think there's a lot of colleges on that list that do choose to exclude which is why that list exists in the first place. But if you include these students how are you creating meaningful outcomes? What happens to them after their education is delivered? And if the after is better than the before, you've made somebody's life-changing path become a reality. And that upward mobility is about creating generational wealth. It's about closing the inequality gaps. So there's so much to that category, to your point, that I think it's something we got to talk about. What do you think?

Paul Glastris: Absolutely. Look, there's a tension in higher education between what people in higher education think of as their work, which is to help raise the standard, right? And focus on creating the brightest, best minds that the country can possibly create. That is in one sense, the role of higher education. And that's an exclusive role. Not everybody can be creating the next innovation that will get a Nobel Prize in a new industry. But the other role of higher education, and it's a very American role, and it's rooted in the history of higher education, is the idea that you can't have a functioning democracy without an educated citizenry. And we are certainly at the era now when almost everyone needs to have some kind of post-secondary education or training. And the benefits of higher education economically are off the charts, you can't really debate it. And so are we going to think of higher education as this rarefied thing that not everyone can handle? Or are we going to think of higher education as something everyone needs to have in one form or another for us to flourish as a country?

And that's a real tension. And look, if you can get into a high-end, highly selective, exclusive school, go for it. I have no problem with those schools existing. I went to one, right? At least one of my schools. And, you know, if your kids can get in, fine. But as a matter of public policy, do we want those schools to get an outsized share of the resources, of the focus, of the attention, of the glory? And do we want those schools to be the ones that set the pattern for what the whole system should be? And I would say no.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You're right on. You always, you know, take your Ivy League that you're thinking of and pick one in your head and somebody donates a billion dollars to the Ivy League. You go, it's going to go into some endowment somewhere and probably make another billion or two billion on top of the billion that was donated. And what if that billion dollars had been given to a state school or a community college? You know, like if you really wanted to create impact, we siphon these dollars of very wealthy individuals into the very wealthy. None of those Ivy Leagues need any money. They don't need any. They have self-sustaining endowments that will make more money than countries make over the next 50 years, 100 years. But there are a lot of colleges that do serve a lower economic student that create accessibility into higher education to create the doorway opening. And boy, boy, are we seeing right now, like literally in front of us, social events happening where you go, education is playing a part in it too, and maybe not the part we thought it would play. And you go, man, there are just different ways to do this. If we resource more colleges and we get more people into the pipeline, we're going to all be better off. 

Have you, when you take a look, I'm getting to my question, but do you think there's that it still happens in America's backyard barbecues where somebody says, well, my student, my kid's going to college and he's going to the number four school or the number 24 school. Is that real? Does that exist anymore?

Paul Glastris: It certainly exists in certain slivers of the country, right? Where you and I grew up in West St. Louis County or St. Charles County, not so much. People aren't obsessing about whether they got into Cornell or Johns Hopkins or Harvard. You know, if you go there, more power to you. People think that's cool. But you know, it's, I'm going to Lindenwood. I'm going to University of Missouri-St. Louis, I'm going to Wash U, I'm going to Mizzou. I don't think that people think that one school is so tremendously better than the other. They say, hey, get a college degree. Good for you. You know, good luck with that. I don't think most people play that game. The upper middle class plays it like crazy. Right. It's a total obsession. And the upper middle class is what drives publications. That's who their readers are. That's who the advertisers go for. You know, most people, I think it's something like 80% of students go to school within a half a day's drive from where they grew up.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: That's a fact. That's a fact.

Paul Glastris: So we're talking about a pretty, you know, it's a large in general numbers, like, you know, tens of millions of people do care about this, but they're a minority of the country.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah. What was your goal when you started the Washington Monthly rankings? What did you want to do? Did you want to create a more grounded visibility for the average American who says, whether it's mom and dad, or whether it's an adult student that says, I'm going to go back to college. I don't know how to pick or what to pick. What do I do? You know, can I afford it? What was the decision-making process like for you to get into this game?

Paul Glastris: We certainly cared about that. I certainly thought about, you know, my own life, my brother's lives, my cousin's lives, the people I went to high school with, having the right tools to choose. But honestly, it was more recognizing how toxic the U.S. News rankings were. And this was 2005 when we did the first one. And it was already obvious then that college was becoming overpriced, you know, that students were having to take on high levels of debt, that we were under-investing in some colleges and over-investing in others. And it just seemed wrong. And, you know, at the Washington Monthly, we literally give ourselves the job of writing stories on policies that we think will move the country in the right direction. That's our job. We might be wrong, but that's our job and you can ignore us, but we don't shy away from the challenge.

So, you know, if you were going to have rankings - we believe in college rankings. We're not one of these publications that say, "It can't possibly compare complex organizations. There's so much nuance, you know, how dare you say one college is better than the other." And we say, well, you say one student's better than the other. So we're going to do the same to you, but it matters how you do it. And so we just saw some accountability on colleges to get them to do the right thing as opposed to the wrong thing that U.S. News made sense.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Talk about the service component. What does that look like? How do you measure it? Why is it so meaningful to the ranking?

Paul Glastris: So it's the part that I think gets the least amount of - I'm so glad you asked the question because it gets the least amount of focus by the press and by others. And we think it's equally as important as the other two. And here's the reason. Go look at the founding documents of almost any college in the country. Go look at the language in all the big laws that were passed over the last 150 years, subsidizing higher education. They all say the same thing. One of the roles of colleges is to prepare students for democratic citizenship. Tell them how to be citizens. Do what I can. But colleges don't take that mandate seriously. It's in their founding documents, but they don't act that way. And I believe that there's a reason that those words are in the laws and the founding documents because it's important. Because we have a democracy, and if people don't engage with it, if they don't vote, if they don't spend a little time giving back, we're going to have a less vibrant, less healthy democracy.

And we are, I don't need to tell you and your audience right now, we are having a heck of a time keeping this democracy going. So we started this in 2005. I think it's more important now than ever to judge colleges by whether they're promoting service and engagement in their country with their students. So what are our measures? We look at the number of students who are participating in ROTC for all the services going into the military. We look at students who went into the Peace Corps, we look at whether the college takes and matches the grants that students who do AmeriCorps, the National Service, they do National Service, they come with an education grant, does the college match that, right? In other words, are they encouraging National Service? We look at whether colleges are using their work-study grants to help students do community service rather than free labor for the university. By the way, it's in the law. They're supposed to do that. We hold them accountable for it. We look at measures of whether they're helping their students cast ballots. Are they helping them register? Are they helping them know where their polling places are? So we have measures for all this stuff. And we think it's enormously important.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah, I mean, you're so right. If you look at the mission of any college or university, they're talking about outputs creating more prepared citizens. What does more prepared citizen mean? It means contributing to the democracy of our great nation where you get to go to college. Not every country offers the accessibility that the US does to education, right? There's all sorts of reasons why we do what we do. However, one of the arguments about college is it's just too darn expensive. We're just seeing... You know, you hear the talking points that tuition outpaces the cost of inflation. You know, we have student loan debt up to how many trillions of dollars and people can't pay back their loans. You know, we have 41 million students with some college, no credential now. It used to be some college, no degree. Now some college, no credential. We're seeing the rise of the, call it the skills-based learning alternatives to a higher education degree, which could be a non-degree student achieving some type of certificate that allows them to go in the workforce and maybe 15 years from now they go back to college. What do you make of all that in terms of just higher education and disruption around the industry right now from your perspective reporting on it?

Paul Glastris: Well, everything you say is true. College is too expensive. Students are taking on too much debt. There are lots of cheaper alternatives. One of the reasons that we created the ranking is to put pressure in the opposite direction. The schools that do well on our rankings are schools that keep a lid on costs. They provide reasonably priced degrees. And we don't just rank four-year schools, we rank vocational schools. We do a ranking of the best and worst vocational schools in everything from welding to medical reception to massage therapy and fantastic programs, some fantastically good programs that provide people for a modest amount of money with a middle-class salary. And then some absolutely awful programs, mostly at for-profit colleges, but not only for-profit colleges. And actually there's some pretty good for-profits, but these are schools that if you go, you're gonna get so much debt that you'll never pay it off and you're gonna wind up earning less on average than you would have if you never went to college at all.

Yeah, so we need some accountability. Our way of doing it is to publish these rankings, but we write story after story after story about what government can do to lower college costs, to lower debt burdens. There's a lot that needs to happen. There's investments that need to be made and controls that need to be put on.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You know, one of the - I was so happy to see whether it was non-credit or for credit growth at community colleges over the - the numbers came out for 2023. They say that there was some minimal growth at community colleges and you go, okay, that's good, right? That's good for all of us. It's good because it's a doorway for people to enter higher education. Community colleges typically are keeping costs down for students that get that two-year degree and then they transfer to whatever private they want. A lot of times, there is a good way to control costs in higher education. 

And one of the ways that we are looking at higher ed now, and I say the average consumer or customer, is how much does it cost and how long does it take me? What I like about your rankings, what you've done, and I'm literally on your website right now, you've got four-year colleges, national, liberal arts, master's universities. You've got the best bang for your buck colleges, and that's the tell-you-like-it-is colleges in each region, which is great, Northeast, Southeast, South, Midwest and West. So we know that students typically stay around their surrounding area when they look at school. So if I'm going to look, I need to know what's in my area. And then this one was really interesting to me, which college boards look like their students? And I went, that's interesting. Tell me about that, Paul, a little bit and why you have that interesting tidbit.

Paul Glastris: You know, colleges care about or claim to care a lot about the diversity of their student bodies. And, you know, we just had a big Supreme Court case that outlawed race-based admissions and there's back and forth about what colleges can do to remain diverse. But when it comes to boards, not only do they not talk about it, they don't even disclose the diversity of their boards. So there's not really a discussion in America about the diversity of college boards. And whether you're - this is an issue that you care about or don't care about, it's hard to argue that the board of a college should be demographically and racially completely different from the demographics of the student body. Just logic kind of dictates that if you have no feel for your customers, i.e. your students, you're probably gonna do a less good job of running that university. And at the very least, we should know whether the college board looks like the student body. 

We, three fine academics looked at 100 representative schools on the Washington Monthly College Ranking and then ranked the colleges based on whether the board matched the student body. So if it's a school where the student body is 95% white, we didn't say the board needs to be 50% minority. We said it's gotta be at least 5% minority, right? And so it's particular to the school, not the nation as a whole. But what we found was pretty vast differences. And we also found that colleges that do a pretty good job of matching the board diversity with the student body diversity tend to do better on the Washington Monthly rankings in general. So there is a question of quality there that I think is - and it's not definitive. This is very early research. But we really wanted to open this up as an issue that we should all be talking about in higher ed. And that at the very least we should get some disclosure of the numbers.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I like it because as I looked through the list and as I'm looking through it, I think there's some - when we look at college rankings and I'm saying the general non-higher education, you know, average consumer, there's always this expectation that you know who's going to be on this list, you see it year after year. And then you go to something like this and you go, whoa, there's - it's just - I love that Montserrat College of Art is number two on this list and their former president Kurt Steinberg, who's a great friend of the podcast. And you see that university, that college over Harvard or over Princeton or over Cal State Fresno and you go, well, that's just interesting when you look at things through different lenses, it changes your perception. I think higher ed is really used to looking at things through our normal lenses and we're adverse to change. We've become adverse to change. Now we've got a necessity of change.

Are you seeing as you're writing, not necessarily related to the rankings, but are you seeing change happen in higher ed the way you would expect at this point in time?

Paul Glastris: Yes, I would say yes. And partly it's anecdotal, you know, when I speak to college presidents and journalists and others, I think that - I think there's no question that the nature of the debate in higher education has changed since we started doing this. There is more of an awareness of certainly the cost problem, the debt problem, the class problem, the inequality problem. I think we have a long way to go to really have an honest discussion about this. But if you look at the Build Back Better bill, which was the big piece of legislation that was gonna fund a lot of things, including higher education that the Democrats were pushing and that crumbled because it couldn't get through the Senate. There was money in there to make community colleges essentially free. Boy, that money would have gone a long way to writing the quite horrible inequity between the amount we spend per student at open admissions colleges and the amount we spend at selective colleges. It's like two to three to one.

You know, students from working-class backgrounds, first-generation minority, going to these community colleges and these regional state schools and so forth in disproportionate numbers need more spending because they're holding down two or three jobs or raising families. They went to less prestigious high schools. They have all the drive that somebody going to Northwestern has, but they, you know, they need, if anything, more help. And we spend half or a third per student on them. Outrageous. No wonder their graduation rates are so low. And so we have students trying to do the right thing, going to school, spending money that they can barely afford or they can't afford, then not graduating and then having to pay off the debt. It's crazy, it's predatory. And so Washington came very close to beginning to write that. And it didn't happen, but I don't think - I think the trend is in the right direction. 

And let me give you another example of the trend being in the right direction. We've had social mobility, upward mobility has been a part of the Washington Monthly rankings since 2005. And we've been beating up on U.S. News & World Report all those years, 18 years saying you should do the same thing. This year, they finally did. They now have significant measures of upward mobility in their rankings. And it's changed their rankings. There's a lot more state schools in the top 30 than there used to be. We used to have, you know, we have a third of all the schools in our top 30 are state, they would have two or three. Now they've got more. That's good.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Nice work. I think that that pressure and then, you know, the conversation that happens around accessibility is playing a big part. It's who you include, not who you exclude. If we're going to really be educating our communities, that means everyone and it means extending resources to everyone. 

You also do a college guide. Talk about the college guide that you do annually. What kind of content goes in the college guide?

Paul Glastris: So we call it our college guide and rankings issue. And it's a combination of the rankings that you and I have been talking about and a series of investigative and feature articles on different aspects of higher education around the same core ideas that animate the rankings. And so, you know, this year, to give you an example, we have a story by James Fallows, the famed journalist, Atlantic magazine, former Carter speechwriter, writing about the politics of higher education and trying to make sense of why it is Republicans and Democrats who used to be more or less aligned on their view of higher education are now widely different. And it's something that's really happened only in the last few years. And kind of offering some advice to people in higher education on what to do about this. And I won't go through the whole story, but I'd urge your folks to read Jim Fallows' great piece in the new issue.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Everybody can go to washingtonmonthly.com. The first click in the main navigation menu, the college guide is the first click that you can make. And you can look at the first story actually is "What's the Matter with Florida" by James Fallows. I think that's the one you're talking about that goes over the political issues. So there's a lot in here. I've read some of these articles already. Very, very good. So a lot of good content. 

We like to end our episodes, Paul, with the same two questions for everyone. First, an open mic moment for you. What else do you want to say about the Washington Monthly to those listening here at the EdUp Experience Podcast?

Paul Glastris: Well, I would say this. I hope people look at our latest issue, which is up online right now, the college guide and rankings. But I hope you'll read our daily and weekly coverage. And we don't just do higher education. We're up, you know, like a diner where you can get, order all kinds of stuff, breakfast all day. We're writing about politics. We're writing about policy. We're writing about healthcare. We're writing about tax policy, but it is all around the same concerns and values that we have on higher education. It's what are the changes in public policy that need to happen to get this country back on a track where everyone has not just an opportunity to join the middle class, but the actual means, right? The ability, the end result of being able to join the middle class. And we do a lot of work on the horrible monopolization of our industries that has really been a terrible blow to the country. So I'd love for them to read the magazine every day and sign up for our weekly newsletter and see what we're doing because I think we're doing something no one else is.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Love it. What do you see for the future of higher education, Paul, based on all your experience?

Paul Glastris: Well, I think there's a battle going on. We don't know who's going to win the battle, but you know, it's happening within every university, right? There are certain imperatives of money and class and power that are forcing some universities to do things they know they maybe shouldn't be doing, but they know that that's the way you advance as a university, whether it's going after certain kinds of, you know, corporate research dollars or, you know, trying to exclude students who will make you look bad and all of that. Looking out for the four-year college and looking out for themselves and not looking out for the two-years and the powerful colleges with the big names, not looking out after the colleges that nobody's heard of outside their geographic areas. So there's a real tension in higher education. And if we don't overcome the trends that have been driving higher education for the last 20 years, I think it's gonna do higher education tremendous damage. This is what you're seeing coming out of the right right now. It's not all that, but a little bit of it is. 

But I don't think that we're fated to go that way. I think there's a lot of goodwill in the country toward the higher education system. Everybody may bad-mouth colleges, but they want their kids to go to college, right? And so I just think if colleges can - if the system itself, the sector itself can move toward serving average students better and pushing policies at the state and federal levels to help them do that, we'll be in good shape.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: If you're looking for a different type of ranking system that has the meaning that you've been looking for, if you're somebody who really believes in the inclusion of all students in higher ed, I'd urge you to check out the Washington Monthly Rankings. It's right on the website. It's clear as day. You can get to it easy. WashingtonMonthly.com. I urge you to follow Paul Glastris. He is a man on a mission. He's been that way for at least since 2001 or 2002 when he started Washington Monthly to change higher ed for the better. Ladies and gentlemen, he's my guest today. He's your guest today. He is the editor-in-chief at the Washington Monthly. He is Paul Glastris. Paul, did you have a good time here on the podcast today? We hope you did.

Paul Glastris: I loved it. Thanks for letting me bend your ear and get a little time with your audience. I'm, you know, fingers crossed that they're going to be able to do the right thing where they work.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Ladies and gentlemen, you've just ed-upped.