The past year has been one of unceasing turmoil in higher education, with assaults on the fundamental social and economic value of college. What’s not debatable, as the Washington Monthly showed with hard numbers, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 also provide states with an exceptional return on state taxpayer dollars. 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.
Both sides of the aisle are guilty of ignoring the contributions of regional universities. Still, it’s possible to break through these sorts of partisan blinders. 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.
