We all know college is expensive. If you’re a typical student attending an in-state public university and living on campus, a bachelor’s degree will cost you around $80,000—or about $4,000 a year spread over four years of school and 16 more paying off your college loans. Double that, at least, if you go out of state or to a private university.

But college is pricey even if you never go or already went and paid off your student loans. That’s because the government spends more than $500 billion annually subsidizing the higher education system. That works out to about $1,700 for the average taxpayer, every year.

We bear these costs because we think the investments are worth it. Students expect that their degrees will pay off in higher incomes and with jobs that aren’t tough on the knees and back. Governments subsidize colleges and universities out of a belief that an educated citizenry and workforce, empowered by the new ideas and technologies that emerge from university research, will lead to greater overall economic growth and a better-functioning democracy.

But even if that’s true in general (and there’s reason to doubt the democracy part these days), how do we know if it’s true for specific colleges and universities? 

College rankings like U.S. News & World Report’s ought to provide the answer, but they don’t, because they aren’t built for that purpose. Instead, they’re designed primarily to capture the eyeballs of students from affluent families who have been instructed since birth to strive to get into the most selective and prestigious possible colleges so they can stay in the ruling class as adults. To achieve this marketing goal, U.S. News and its dozen or so competitors craft their metrics to reflect a set of self-referential assumptions—that the “best” colleges are those with the best reputations, that let in only the “best” students (that is, those with the highest SAT scores, who happen to attend the wealthiest high schools), and that raise and spend the most money (because, by catering to the rich, they can). This assures that the same 10 or 20 elite universities, most of them private, always dominate the top ranks. It’s a smart business model for a publisher. But it leaves the vast majority of students, who don’t have sky-high test scores and money to burn, without the information they need to navigate one of the biggest decisions of their lives. And it makes average taxpayers wonder if the country is getting its money’s worth.

For two decades, the Washington Monthly has published an alternative set of rankings based on a different definition of what constitutes excellence in higher education. Instead of rewarding colleges for their wealth, prestige, and exclusivity, we measure how much they help ordinary middle- and working-class students get ahead, encourage democratic participation and service to the country, and produce the scholars and scholarship that drive economic growth and human flourishing. These, we think, are what most Americans want from their investments in the higher ed system.

This year, we’ve revised our rankings to provide an even clearer picture of how individual colleges are performing—and to take account of new realities facing higher education. As everyone knows, the Trump administration has launched an unprecedented assault on university research budgets and internal governance (an attack that Kevin Carey mordantly illuminates here). Meanwhile, in a more benign upheaval, the organization that categorizes colleges, the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, rewrote its definitions of what constitutes a major research university, a liberal arts college, and so on. 

So, for 2025, we’ve arranged our traditional metrics differently. First, we’ve combined all four-year colleges and universities into a single master list of more than 1,400 institutions, which we’re calling the Best Colleges for Your Tuition (and Tax) Dollars. This allows you to see how any college or university—public or private, big or small, research or teaching—stacks up against all the others. (You can read our methodology here.) Second, to make apples-to-apples comparisons, we’ve moved our research metrics into a new companion ranking, America’s Best Colleges for Research, which recognizes the contributions of the subset of institutions that invest the most in scientific and technical discovery. (You can also read rankings by traditional categories—liberal arts, master’s, and bachelor’s colleges—here.) 

To get a sense of how different the higher ed hierarchy looks when measured by the Washington Monthly’s metrics, check out the adjacent chart, which shows the highest-scoring 30 schools on the Best Colleges for Your Tuition (and Tax) Dollars list. The first thing you’ll notice is that prestigious and world-famous universities make up only half the list. The other half are mostly unheralded public institutions, many of which outrank the elite ones. The University of Texas–Rio Grande Valley lands 21 slots above Harvard University, Florida International University eight above Duke University. Indeed, the highest-ranking elite school, Princeton University, comes in at number five, immediately below three campuses in the California State University system that are largely unknown outside their regions, including second-place Fresno State. And the number one college in America, by our lights, is Berea College, a liberal arts school in rural Kentucky.

These unsung colleges are, to be blunt, not the kind to which ambitious and well-off parents urge their children to apply. But the colleges don’t care, and neither do we, because what makes them extraordinary is what they do for students from not-so-well-off households. Berea provides moderate-to-low-income students from Appalachia with rigorous academics and valuable work experience while charging incredibly low tuition. Those students graduate with the lowest average debt levels in the country, many with degrees in socially beneficial fields like nursing, and with post-college earnings $5,000 higher than students with similar backgrounds at other schools. Fresno State offers students in California’s poverty-pockmarked Central Valley affordable tuition, research and community service opportunities, and degrees that earn them middle-class incomes. Some go on to become managers of agricultural businesses where, as children, they once picked crops. We’ve profiled 25 of these exceptional institutions here. 

For a less inspirational experience, check out the schools near the bottom of the list. You’ll find some for-profits like DeVry University’s campus in Columbus, Georgia; religious institutions like Abilene Christian University in Texas; various art and music schools whose students pretty much know they’re studying for professions that don’t pay; and a slew of small liberal arts colleges, many of them in out-of-the-way locations and struggling to survive. All these schools tend to combine high net prices for median-income students with poor post-college earnings and high debt loads. Some are outright predatory. Others are doing the best they know how in tough situations. All are under increased threat of closure by provisions in the recently signed “One Big Beautiful” legislation that will cut off federal funds to underperforming colleges. Our hearts go out to the small college towns that will suffer when that legislation kicks in. But our advice to prospective students: You’ll do better by searching higher up on our Best Colleges for Your Tuition (and Tax) Dollars list. 

Comparing the best- and worst-performing colleges in a particular state can be especially enlightening. Nate Weisberg looked at New York and found some hidden gems. One is tiny Boricua College, number 45 on the list, which mostly serves adult Latinos with day jobs who would otherwise struggle to earn a degree. Another is the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, number 88, part of the famous City University of New York system. It enrolls a student body that is more than 75 percent nonwhite, half first-generation, and largely working class. The net price for median-income students is just $2,661, and its graduates pursue public service careers—law enforcement, social work, legal aid—at rates that elite colleges can’t match. Indeed, at the other end of the spectrum are Sarah Lawrence College (ranked at number 1,095) and the New School (1,379), two progressive New York institutions once known for their outreach to the working classes that are now better at ignoring them.

One pattern you might notice is that the upper reaches of our ranking are dominated by public universities from a handful of states. New York is one. California, Florida, Texas, and North Carolina are others. These states have relatively strong centralized systems of higher ed governance, which helps keep spending down and quality up, and abiding commitments to provide low tuition and fees to in-state students of modest means. But as Christopher M. Mullin reports, these same centralized systems are also how state politicians like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are imposing a conservative ideological agenda in the classroom. 

Donald Trump is attempting to do the same at the federal level by decimating research funding to universities that don’t bend to his political will. The biggest targets of his assault, naturally, are elite universities in blue states. But like much of Trump’s second-term agenda, the greatest pain is being felt in red states whose voters he claims to champion, as Weisberg explains in his introduction to our Best Colleges for Research ranking. 

The Monthly’s rankings can help prospective students search for colleges and average citizens judge the performance of their alma maters. But they can be even more useful to higher education leaders—the professors, presidents, and trustees who run individual institutions, as well as the elected officials who make the policy and spending decisions that ultimately determine the fate of American higher education.  

These leaders know, for instance, that the abnormally large Millennial generation is giving way to the smaller Gen Z, making it harder for colleges to fill seats—and balance their budgets. One hopeful countertrend is that the number of Hispanic high school graduates is projected to increase by 16 percent by 2041. Yet decision-makers lack good data on which colleges do the best job serving this all-important group. That’s why the Washington Monthly’s Rob Wolfe, in collaboration with the nonprofit Excelencia in Education, has created a new Best Hispanic-Serving Colleges ranking. 

More broadly, rankings influence the decisions education leaders make, for good or ill. U.S. News’s lists are so powerful that college presidents, under pressure from their boards and legislatures, try to climb the rankings by making their institutions more selective, spending more money on amenities, and recruiting wealthy students from around the country. While this can elevate their national “brand,” it also ratchets up college costs, limits access, and contributes to the average person’s sense that colleges and universities aren’t trust-worthy—which the Trump administration has been quick to exploit.

The Washington Monthly’s rankings create a different incentive structure. To climb our list, college can’t just cater to the children of the donor class, spend money on new buildings and cover the costs with higher tuition, or let lower-income students flounder and leave without graduating. Instead, they must open their doors to non-wealthy students, help them earn degrees that lead to decent incomes, encourage them to give back to their communities, and keep a check on spending. Those are outcomes that trustees and lawmakers in both parties should be able to get behind. And colleges are figuring out that they can use their high Monthly rankings to advocate for more generous budgets and other support. If that trend continues—and we hope it does—America will be a more democratic, equitable, and prosperous country.

The post A Different Kind of College Ranking appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In the cold, dark months after the election, when higher education leaders knew something bad was coming, but not yet exactly what, they referred to the year-old congressional hearings the way people name infamous terrorist attacks: the month, the day, and no further explanation necessary. On December 5 (2023), three Ivy Plus presidents walked into a congressional hearing to answer questions about anti-Semitism, protest, and free speech. Only one walked out with her job intact. The long tradition of bipartisan deference to elite higher education authority had been shattered. The pieces are still crackling and crumbling today. 

It wasn’t a complete surprise. Ron DeSantis’s plan for rising above national political rivals had involved a combination of suspiciously engineered cowboy boots and the remaking of a defenseless public liberal arts college in his image. Did this do anything to make college more effective, or affordable? Of course not. The point, as always, was projecting strength as dominance through transgression. While DeSantis lost the presidential primary to the Sith Lord of the form, he taught other Republicans that government deference to public university independence was just one more eminently breakable norm. 

This came as a new generation of right-wing leaders were doing the one thing that all elected politicians—regardless of talent, temperament, and ideology—tend to be good at: noticing who votes for them, and who doesn’t. The electorate was reorganizing itself around higher education, creating a deep well of working-class people without college degrees ready to cross over to the MAGA tribe. The Biden administration’s wildly expensive student loan forgiveness agenda, which was smart in some ways and not in others, made college feel less like bi-partisan economic opportunity for all and more like a fat payoff to a key Democratic voting bloc. 

After Trump’s reelection, the Hill staffers and think tank dudes had a look in their eyes. The debt relief gravy train was over. All the DEI nonsense was through. The elite colleges and universities needed to be punished. Sure, that’s where most of them went to college themselves—all the more reason! They remembered the condescension, the superiority, that time they weren’t invited to the … er, that is, the arrogance! It was time to bring higher education to heel. 

Which fit right into the emerging authoritarian revolutionary Gramsci-as-explained-by-ChatGPT wing of the movement full of guys like Chris Rufo, who turned the parlor trick of announcing his devious plans on Twitter ahead of time into roughly 17 deferential profiles in The New York Times, where he explained that, since a full great replacement strategy of converting the liberal academy into a conservative indoctrination machine was logistically impossible, the best alternative was to “adjust the formula of finances from the federal government to the universities in a way that puts them in an existential terror.”

“Adjust the formula” turned out to be a genteel way of describing the Trump administration’s campaign of all-out warfare against what were until five minutes ago considered to be irreplaceable jewels in the tarnished crown of American global leadership, our world-class research universities. 

The National Endowment for the Humanities has been gutted. The administration has proudly announced billions of dollars in cuts to research on energy, health, defense, agriculture, and more. Despite an obsession with trade deficits, the move to cut off the flow of international students would decimate one of America’s most successful export industries, costing colleges in blue states and red billions more. The Republican-passed budget reconciliation bill killed the federal Grad PLUS loan program, eliminating a major source of revenue for students getting advanced degrees. 

As for “existential terror,” there is simply no precedent in American history for the way Trump has turned the full force of the federal government against elite universities. The parallels with Trump man crush Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine strategy are striking: a surprise despite months of clear warning signs only because people couldn’t bring themselves to believe anyone could be so evil; an utter disregard for the law; a bumbling overconfidence that instantly turned to outrage at the first signs of resistance; a decent long-term chance of success nonetheless because there’s no power like the executive leadership of a nuclear state enabled by a servile legislative branch; and massive damage to infrastructure and human potential that will be felt for decades to come. 

Trump’s minions come in different flavors. Some, like OMB Director Russell Vought, brought insider savvy to the mission of tearing down the federal government and starving children in other countries to death. The administration’s early move to illegally cut the overhead costs on federal research grants bespoke Vought-like cunning. Normal people don’t know that “overhead” includes building and maintaining the laboratory the research is conducted in. Others clearly benefited from the most powerful affirmative action preference in American society: appointing fantastically unqualified people to positions of government power based solely on their MAGA bona fides. This, presumably, is what led to the administration forcing a high-stakes legal confrontation with Harvard by accidentally hitting “send” on the wrong email. 

In the early days of Trump’s war on the academy, higher education leaders like Wesleyan University president Michael Roth distinguished themselves by standing up and denouncing the administration’s actions as authoritarian, anti-democratic, and un-American. As the months went by and one outrage piled upon the next, the list of brave college presidents was … still mostly just Michael Roth, as many leaders chose the path of least resistance, to tyranny. In normal times, colleges compete with one another for students, faculty, grants, and prestige. They’re not practiced in solidarity and collective action. 

The exceptions, like Princeton president Chris Eisgruber, were generally long established in their roles. Universities run by some combination of an interim leader and a board of directors have fared much worse. Public university boards are often filled with politically connected donors and loyal alumni, while private boards favor hedge fund wealth. A good president knows how to balance the core scholarly values of the faculty with the tendency of board members to lean toward safety, money, and political power. A university being run behind the scenes right now by Bob, Class of ’98, who founded a successful tech firm and likes to tailgate, is in serious trouble. 

Columbia University, which is on a second acting president after its last permanent leader resigned barely a year into the job in 2024, has been desperately trying to wave the white flag to the White House, which responded to each of the university’s various innovations in surrendering with even more punishments and demands. Trump’s message to higher learning is “Submit, or we will ruin you—but we’re going to ruin you regardless.” As if to prove the point, in late July, Brown and Columbia agreed to pay the Trump administration hundreds of millions of dollars in fines while also submitting to unprecedented White House control over their admissions, hiring, and academic practices. After giving in, university leaders insisted that they had preserved their dignity and independence, which is like believing that the gangster who just made you sign a business deal with a gun pointed at your head will definitely act legally and in good faith the next time around. 

The massive cuts to university-based research are example number 10 kazillion that material self-interest is a spent force in politics. Everything is culture war now. Billions of dollars in science funding are in jeopardy at research universities in red states, surely resulting in losses of jobs and billions in long-term economic activity. Yet too many of their leaders are silent and their politicians are complicit, or enthusiastic. The University of Virginia has long been one of the nation’s great public universities. Then Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin appointed a Trump-friendly university board. Now UVA is a place where presidents are subjected to ritual humiliation for the crime of trying to make a historically elitist institution a little better at serving students of color, in living memory of massive resistance to racial integration. 

Trump’s assault on college increasingly looks like his long-term vision for America in microcosm: dissidents black-bagged by masked government agents; critical government funding bled dry; values like racial justice and religious tolerance perverted and weaponized on behalf of a white, “Christian” power structure; public institutions degraded and diminished except for their capacity to impose ideological control. 

Much mainstream commentary has conceded that, yes, Trump’s actions are blatantly illegal and, granted, will destroy American research supremacy that took a century to build, but, also, didn’t higher education have it coming? Because of the, you know, woke DEI, and so forth? 

Look. The Washington Monthly bows to no one in arguing that higher education is in need of serious reform. Almost every article we’ve published in 20 years of college guides makes the case that some part of the system is falling short. The whole point of our college rankings is to shift attention away from the wealthy, prestigious, exclusive universities that suck up all the oxygen in the mainstream media and often fall short of their obligations to the public good—the very same universities that Trump is going after now. Campus speech is a complicated issue, and not everyone has gotten it right. The professoriate is definitely more liberal than society at large, and serious people have tried to figure out why. 

But the idea that Trump’s jihad against the academy is somehow the natural downstream result of shifting public opinion against radicalized higher education is simply incorrect. The typical college experience involves taking a marketing class taught by an underpaid adjunct with completely normal political views, not being subject to Marxist indoctrination. Colleges remain among the most trusted institutions in a time when trust is in short supply. 

More importantly, a basic responsibility of being an adult human being is seeing the distinction between “things people say on social media that really get my goat” and “things that actually matter to real people in the real world.” It’s understanding that “we should make this better” is the opposite of “we should blow this to smithereens.” Very often, the enemy of your enemy is not your friend. He’s a terrible person you should not associate with or support in any way. 

Trump’s war on American higher education is an attempt to destroy a great and good system of higher learning and replace it with a smaller, weaker set of institutions that offer little more than low-cost job training and state-sponsored propaganda. There are no silver linings here, no painful but necessary corrections, no opportunities for something newer and better to rise from the ashes. There are just ashes, piling up by the day.

The post Higher Education: What Trump Hath Wrought appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Every fall, a familiar set of college rankings tell the same tired story. The wealthiest, most exclusive schools dominate the top. That leaves the vast majority of prospective students—whose SAT scores and family income aren’t in the upper 1 percent—to navigate one of the most consequential decisions of their lives armed with a deeply skewed picture of what “best” really means. And it leaves average citizens, whose taxes underwrite the higher education system to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, wondering if the country is getting its money’s worth. The Washington Monthly College Guide and Rankings exist to offer a better answer.

This year, for the first time, we’ve combined all four-year colleges and universities—public and private, big and small, research and teaching—into a single master list of more than 1,400 institutions, America’s Best Colleges for Your Tuition (and Tax) Dollars. And we’ve revamped our methodology to focus even more squarely on what we think Americans most want from our colleges and universities: that they help students of modest means earn degrees that pay off in the marketplace, don’t saddle them with heavy debt, and prepare—indeed, encourage—them to become active members of our democracy. To allow for apples-to-apples comparisons, we’ve separated out research performance into a new companion ranking, America’s Best Colleges for Research, which recognizes the contributions of the subset of institutions that invest the most in the scholarship and scholars that drive scientific discovery and economic growth. (For more detail on our methodology, see here.)

Berea College

This tiny college in Appalachian Kentucky has been a top contender in the Washington Monthly’s rankings for the past decade, and this year once again proves that this was no accident.

Why? There’s simply no school that does as well by non-wealthy students as Berea College. Ninety-six percent of students—an incredibly high proportion—qualify for Pell Grants, federal financial assistance that is given to qualifying low- and middle-income students. Those students pay just $3,395 a year, factoring in aid. And they outperform expectations in every major way: graduation rate, debt, and earnings. That’s why we’re proud this year to rank Berea the number one school in America. 

Founded in 1855 by abolitionists who were the first to admit Black students in a southern state, Berea now operates as a federally recognized “work college.” Students spend at least 10 hours a week at on-campus jobs that keep the school running and its costs low. They start off in character-building jobs like food preparation and janitorial work and are given more choice in roles after their first year. Students might file paperwork, assist professors, conduct research, or herd cattle on the college farm. In return, they pay zero tuition and cover most other expenses—including room and board—with their $34-an-hour work scholarships, plus additional outside funding.

Those low costs add up to a rosy financial future for Berea’s graduates, who leave with the second-lowest debt of any school in the country (an average of $4,041) and earn $5,000 a year more, on average, than people of a similar background nine years after enrolling. Berea’s no-tuition, low-debt model is helping to close desperate worker shortages in fields such as nursing, where in Kentucky 3,900 positions went unfilled in 2023—proving that, in serving its students so well, Berea is serving everybody.

Berea is a selective school; its acceptance rate last year was 33 percent. But unlike other selective institutions, Berea is laser focused on opening its doors to the people who will benefit the most: low-income students from Appalachia, who make up more than 70 percent of the population. Not every school can copy Berea’s work study model, either. (Though plenty can, and should follow in its footsteps. Another federally recognized work college, the historically Black institution Paul Quinn, has risen significantly in our rankings through its efforts to “poverty-proof” its experience through low prices and hands-on career preparation.) But if other schools carefully tailor their offerings to benefit the most vulnerable, as Berea has done, they can make similar strides.

And if you’re a college seeker, particularly one in Appalachia, there’s no better leg up than this little school in the foothills.

California State University, Fresno

California State University, Fresno, shows how a public institution can deliver extraordinary value—without prestige branding, sky-high tuition, or exclusionary admission.

Located in Fresno County—an agricultural power-house with stubbornly high poverty in the heart of California’s Central Valley—Fresno State does the hard work of upward mobility. Our rankings use the number of federal Pell Grant recipients a school enrolls as a proxy for how accessible it is to students from median-income-and-below families. And Fresno enrolls 12,600 of them. The average net price for students from median-income families is just $5,171, and average student debt is $14,715, well below the national average. 

Fresno State’s outcomes land it in the top 25 percent of schools we rank, which is amazing given the economic challenges its students face. And its commitment to civic engagement is exceptional: More than 40 percent of federal work study funds go to community service, and 17 percent of students graduate with service-oriented degrees like teaching and social work.

Founded in 1911 as a teacher-training school, Fresno State joined the CSU system in the 1960s after moving to its current campus on the city’s northeast edge in 1956. Today it serves around 24,000 students, most of whom come from the surrounding region. It is also classified as an R2 research university, awarding 20 research and scholarship doctoral degrees a year.

But what makes Fresno State—and the CSU system more broadly—remarkable is not research output or selectivity. It’s regional commitment. Fresno doesn’t view education as a ticket out. It sees it as a way to root students more deeply in the place they call home.

President Saúl Jiménez-Sandoval grew up working on a farm in nearby Fowler. Many of his students have similar stories—raised in farmworker families, spending summers picking crops or helping to run small businesses. Today, they study agricultural science, business, and engineering, not to escape the Central Valley but to reinvest in it. Some go on to run the very firms whose products they once harvested.

That spirit infuses the institution. Fresno State runs the first and largest commercial winery in the country operated by students. Its research centers support the valley’s multibillion-dollar farm economy, testing everything from herbicide resistance to sustainable irrigation practices. And its library—one of the largest in the CSU system—underscores the school’s intellectual seriousness, even as the campus retains a proudly working-class ethos.

As a Hispanic-serving institution in one of the most heavily Latino regions in the country, Fresno State plays a critical role in expanding opportunity. (See “America’s Best Hispanic-Serving Colleges.”) Nearly 65 percent of students are the first in their family to attend college. Many stay close after graduating. 

Fresno State is one pillar of a CSU system (along with third-ranked CSU Northridge, fourth-ranked CSU Los Angeles, sixth-ranked CSU Sacramento, and many others) that dominates the upper reaches of our rankings. And that’s no surprise, because the CSU system excels at what higher education is supposed to do: make the American Dream more real, more local, and more attainable.

Princeton University

For all the justified derision directed at elite universities, Princeton remains the exception that proves the rule: Yes, a school can be highly selective (roughly 4 percent acceptance rate) and lavishly endowed (upward of $34 billion) and still serve the public interest. It ranks fifth overall in our rankings not because of its wealth or pedigree, but because it chooses to deploy both in the service of access, affordability, and real outcomes.

Low-to-moderate-income students at Princeton pay just $5,000 a year, on average. The university has eliminated loans from its financial aid packages, and its graduates carry some of the lowest debt levels in the country. It’s not that Princeton enrolls huge numbers of low-income students—about 1,000 receive Pell Grants, which is average for an Ivy League school—it’s that it serves those students particularly well. 

The school is also, of course, one of the most prestigious bastions of research in the country. On our Best Colleges for Research ranking, Princeton ranks fifth in the share of its faculty elected to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

But what’s interesting is that Princeton has shown a rare willingness to use its institutional heft for something other than self-preservation. In April, when the Trump administration moved, without any clear demands, to restrict millions in federal research grants to the school using a thin pretext of anti-Semitism, the school’s president went on the offensive, giving a flurry of interviews to the national media. In an interview with Bloomberg a day after the cuts were announced, Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber made clear that Princeton would not offer concessions or policy changes to regain access to the grants, and he encouraged other schools to follow his lead in exercising their legal rights instead of cowering. “We have to be willing to stand up for [academic freedom],” he said. “In principle, we have to be willing to speak up … we have to be willing to say no to funding if it’s going to constrain our ability to pursue the truth.” To that end, the university floated a $320 million taxable bond to keep its research enterprise afloat. And in May, the school launched “Stand Up,” a communications initiative aimed at informing alumni and the public about threats to academic freedom and federal research funding. In doing so, Princeton behaved less like a cloistered institution of privilege and more like a public-serving institution—one willing to use its influence to protect academic freedom and democratic norms. For that it deserves our praise.

University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

In 2013, the Texas legislature voted to combine two regional campuses into a single new university: the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. The goal was to create a flagship-caliber institution for the state’s poorest region, one that could finally match the valley’s demographic gravity with educational power. In the decade since, UTRGV has done just that.

Today, UTRGV enrolls around 34,000 students across multiple campuses in Edinburg, Brownsville, Harlingen, and beyond. Roughly 93 percent of undergraduates are Hispanic, and more than 66 percent are the first in their family to attend college. Just under 17,000 receive Pell Grants. The university offers a tuition guarantee for families earning under $125,000 and keeps net price below $5,600 for median-income students. Average debt is among the lowest in Texas.

A testament to its success in such a short time, UTRGV will kick off its Division I football program this fall.

But the school’s impact goes far beyond access or athletics. Twenty-two percent of graduates have service-oriented majors, and UTRGV is the largest producer of bilingual educators in Texas. It has invested heavily in regionally focused research; its South Texas Diabetes and Obesity Institute and newly funded Harlingen Diabetes Center of Excellence target local health disparities. In 2016, UTRGV opened the valley’s first public medical school, expanding access to care in one of the state’s most underserved areas. In 2022, UTRGV opened the state’s only school of podiatric medicine and will launch a physical therapy program this fall. It is also in the process of developing the state’s second public optometry school, which will open in 2027, pending accreditation. 

There’s nothing generic about this institution. Its programs reflect the needs of the borderlands. And its students, overwhelmingly local, are reshaping what public higher education can look like when built with—and for—a community. UTRGV is redefining what a regional public university can do.

The University of Central Florida

The University of Central Florida was born with a countdown clock. In 1963, as rockets roared off the pads at Cape Canaveral, Florida lawmakers founded a university just 35 miles west to train the engineers, programmers, and technicians who would help America win the space race. It was called Florida Technological University, and its mission was explicit: to be the academic launchpad for the Apollo era.

Today, the renamed University of Central Florida still carries the same DNA. Its main campus in Orlando sits on a 1,400-acre footprint shaped like a circular NASA launch complex—complete with a central “launchpad” plaza at its heart. The university is one of the largest in the country by enrollment, with nearly 70,000 students, and one of the most technologically focused. It is a national leader in optics, lasers, aerospace, and simulation, all fed by deep partnerships with NASA, Space Force, and behemoth defense contractors like Lockheed Martin.

But UCF isn’t just a pipeline to Cape Canaveral. It’s also a national engine of upward mobility. The university ranks 17th overall in the Monthly’s list thanks to strong scores on access and affordability. It enrolls more than 20,000 recipients of Pell Grants, and its average net price for students from median-income families is just $7,510. These students carry an average debt load of $18,525, which is below the national average.

UCF’s student body reflects the future of American higher ed: racially and economically diverse, many the first in their family to go to college, and overwhelmingly from Florida. Rather than try to emulate elite flagships, UCF has embraced its size and mission, developing one of the most sophisticated student success infrastructures in the country. It uses predictive analytics to identify at-risk students, offers them extensive peer mentoring, and, like the rest of the Florida school system (see Christopher M. Mullin, “Florida’s Fresh-Squeezed Colleges”), it has streamlined its course offerings to help students graduate on time. 

The results show. UCF graduates earn solid middle-class salaries. Many stay local, fueling Central Florida’s booming aerospace, health care, and tourism sectors.

Civic engagement is part of the mix. About 18 percent of UCF students pursue service-oriented majors like education and social work, though that figure doesn’t even capture alumni employed by NASA, who are no doubt serving their country too. And the university holds the Carnegie Community Engagement designation—a national recognition for colleges that build strong partnerships with local communities through service, research, and education. The school’s growing downtown campus, located steps from Orlando’s city hall, was designed as a public-private partnership—with space for nonprofits, clinics, and local job-training programs integrated alongside classrooms.

The school’s research profile is also on the rise. UCF now spends more than $200 million annually on research (boosting it to number 98 on the Monthly’s Best Colleges for Research list), with particular strengths in photonics, simulation, and biomedical engineering. It comes in at number 58 in science and engineering PhDs awarded, and number 104 in faculty accolades. UCF is a young university, but one that’s punching well above its weight.

Williams College

One of the nation’s most prestigious liberal arts colleges, this school tucked in the Berkshires also makes the top of the Monthly’s social mobility–focused list thanks to the unmatched outcomes it offers its students.

The average Williams student pays just $1,027 a year, after financial aid. That’s the third-cheapest education in the country. Once they make it through Williams’s rigorous academic programs, students graduate with low debt and go on to earn PhDs at the highest rate of any American university. (Williams graduates slightly underperform in their early-career earnings, but that’s likely because so many are pursuing advanced degrees.)

Williams has a small population—2,150 students—and a 232-year history. That has created some strong traditions. Each January, students stay on for “Winter Study,” a monthlong break period where they take only one class, often a study abroad taught by alumni. Its academics are modeled on the close, personal tutoring of Oxford and Cambridge. The Ephs—the nickname for Williams students—have need of all that tradition. The closest city of any size is Albany, an hour away.

When it comes to access, Williams has some room for improvement. The college only admits a small number of students on federal Pell Grants, which means it ranks 759th in terms of how easily non-wealthy students can gain admission. The overall acceptance rate is only 10 percent. Once they’re there, however, those students do well. They make it through college at a higher rate than others with their income level and test scores.

For those who get in the door, the quality of a Williams education can’t be questioned.

Brigham Young University

Brigham Young University is, in many ways, one of the most distinctive institutions in American higher education. Owned and operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it is at once a faith-based university, a national academic performer, and a deeply affordable option for low- and middle-income students. It operates on a different model—and, to a large extent, a different set of values—than most of its peers.

The numbers are hard to argue with. More than 10,000 undergraduates receive Pell Grants (roughly one in three students). Tuition is just over $5,000 for members of the LDS Church (double that for non-LDS students, very few of whom attend), and the university discourages debt both culturally and structurally. Because BYU is owned and operated by the LDS Church and is considered a religious institution, the First Amendment’s establishment and free exercise clauses protect its ability to favor members of its sponsoring church in tuition and other policies. Students graduate with an average loan burden of just $11,523, compared to the national average of $26,000, and more than half borrow nothing at all. BYU’s graduation rate is well over the average, and its alumni earnings are strong across sectors, from business and law to STEM and government service.

Brigham Young University boasts a strict honor code that governs everything from dress to dating to doctrinal belief. Further, it is a place where academic rigor exists alongside religious instruction, where student life is shaped as much by ecclesiastical authority as by campus governance. The university has been a focal point in national debates over LGBTQ rights in religious education, particularly since its Title IX exemptions—which allow the university to ban same-sex intimacy on campus—drew scrutiny from civil rights groups and the Department of Education under President Joe Biden.

Still, for tens of thousands of students from the LDS Church, BYU offers an elite-caliber education aligned with spiritual mission. It sends graduates into federal clerkships and the CIA, but also into missionary work and church leadership. It is at once inward facing and professionally ambitious.

While many universities drift toward ideological sameness, BYU remains deliberately apart. Whether you see it as a beacon or a bubble may depend on what you think a university is for—but there’s no denying BYU’s power as a vehicle of upward mobility within its community.

Pomona College

At first glance, Pomona College looks like the quintessential liberal arts powerhouse: a leafy, elite enclave nestled in beautiful Southern California, part of the prestigious Claremont Colleges consortium. But what sets Pomona apart isn’t just its small class sizes, generous endowment, or 7 percent acceptance rate. It’s that this elite school actually delivers on affordability—and, to a lesser degree, equity.

Start with the numbers. Pomona ranks third in affordability among all liberal arts colleges in the Washington Monthly rankings. Median-income students who attend pay a net price of just $4,828 per year—lower than most public universities. And when they graduate, they carry some of the lightest debt burdens in the country: just $11,257 on average, which ranks fourth best among peer institutions. That combination of low price and low debt is a powerful engine of mobility, especially for the subset of students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

That subset, however, is smaller than it could be. Pomona enrolls around 318 recipients of Pell Grants—not a trivial number, but modest for a school of its size and resources. Thus Pomona ranks 640th overall in access, not because it fails to support low-income students, but because it admits a small, carefully curated student body. For the students who attend, the resources are extraordinary. Students at the school enjoy the opportunity to explore classes (and a social life) at the four other Claremont Colleges—Harvey Mudd (ranked number 91), Claremont McKenna (55), Pitzer (228), and Scripps (363). And few have ever complained about the Southern California climate.

Among elite liberal arts colleges, Pomona is a leader on affordability—and a quiet rebuttal to the idea that small, private institutions can’t contribute to economic mobility. Its impact may be measured in depth, not breadth—but for the students who make it in, the opportunity is real. 

Arizona State University

Arizona State University calls itself the “New American University.” That kind of branding might sound like marketing hype—but in this case, it reflects something real. ASU is one of the largest and most ambitious public universities in the country, serving more than 183,000 students across its online and in-person programs. It ranks 32nd overall in the Monthly’s rankings and an impressive 14th in access, largely due to its scale and dedication to serving low- and middle-income students.

Just under 80,000 students are enrolled in ASU’s “campus immersion” programs in Tempe, downtown Phoenix, Mesa, and elsewhere. Among them, 42 percent are the first in their families to attend college, and 31 percent receive Pell Grants. The school admits almost all students who meet basic requirements and maintains a relatively low net price of $10,638. Median student debt at graduation—$19,926—is well below the national average of 26,400.

Founded in 1885, ASU has grown into the opposite of an ivory tower. It has a sprawling physical presence, a diverse student body, and a research engine that ranks 26th in the nation in producing STEM PhDs.

ASU’s relatively low outcomes ranking—934th out of roughly 1,400 colleges—reflects more of a data quirk than a performance failure. Graduation rates are reported separately by campus, and ASU’s main Tempe campus graduates 67 percent of its students—well above the national average. But the federal earnings data used in our rankings combines all ASU graduates, including those from its enormous online program, which has a lower graduation rate (44 percent) and serves a different, sometimes less prepared, population. That’s the paradox of scale: ASU opens its doors wider than almost any flagship university in the country, but serving tens of thousands of students from diverse academic and economic backgrounds makes consistency harder to deliver.

The university also does well on public service, putting a significant share of federal work study dollars into community-based jobs. Nearly 13 percent of graduates go into fields like teaching, social work, or nonprofit leadership. ASU also receives national recognition for its civic engagement efforts—partnering with local schools, clinics, and public agencies throughout the Phoenix area.

The campus culture reflects ASU’s dual personality: part research university, part civic engine. In Tempe, the desert sun bakes a skyline of gleaming new academic buildings, corporate partnerships, and start-up incubators. But scattered throughout the metro area are clinics, K–12 collaborations, and outreach programs that still reflect the school’s public mission.

Like many large state institutions, ASU may lack the hands-on feel of a small liberal arts college. For many students, though, it is exactly what they need it to be: affordable, flexible, career focused, and rich in opportunity. Few schools can say the same at ASU’s scale. And as a model for what large public universities might become—open-access, innovation driven, and public spirited—it remains one of the most important institutions in American higher education.

Johns Hopkins University

Johns Hopkins has the vibe of an Ivy but the engine of a federal agency. Tucked into Baltimore’s Charles Village, the campus blends redbrick quads and Georgian buildings with modern glass-and-steel labs. Students juggle biomedical engineering problem sets and cello recitals, while across town, faculty members lead pandemic response teams or run trials on Alzheimer’s disease treatments.

This is America’s original research university—the prototype. Founded in 1876 with a German-style focus on graduate training and original scholarship, Hopkins pioneered the very idea that universities should produce new knowledge. Today, it still spends more on research than any other college in the country: more than $3.6 billion a year, much of it in biomedical science and public health. Its School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health are among the world’s best.

More surprising: It’s relatively affordable. With an average net price of just $2,708 for median-income students, Hopkins ranks 17th in affordability—cheaper than many state schools, thanks to aggressive financial aid for those who make it through the admission gauntlet. Access is a mixed story. Just over 1,100 Pell Grant recipients are enrolled—not a standout figure, but far from the worst among elite private institutions. 

Hopkins ranks fifth in research in our 2025 rankings and 22nd in producing science and engineering PhDs. Its faculty are among the most awarded in the country, and its labs remain critical to national health and security. Given all of this, it is hard to fathom why the Trump administration has singled the school out so callously. Earlier this year, the U.S. government abruptly cut more than $800 million in global health funding to Hopkins, gutting dozens of programs linked to USAID. (For more on the cuts, see “America’s Best Colleges for Research.”)

Still, Hopkins will endure. What it lacks in warm-and-fuzzy liberal arts feel, it makes up for in seriousness of purpose. Its undergrads are known for their intensity—biophysics majors double-major in classics, engineers launch nonprofits in their spare time, and pre-meds volunteer in Baltimore clinics before sunrise. The Homewood campus might not have the rah-rah spirit of a Big Ten school, but it crackles with natural ambition that political attacks can’t tame. 

Florida Atlantic University

With its main campus in Boca Raton and satellites in various other South Florida beach towns, Florida Atlantic University might sound like the kind of institution that caters to dissolute out-of-state rich kids. Instead, its student body mirrors the striving, diverse, predominantly working-to-middle-class demographics of surrounding Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade Counties. At number 39 on the Washington Monthly’s rankings, FAU places higher than elite private schools elsewhere in the South like Rice, Vanderbilt, and Emory. That’s because the Monthly rewards colleges for enrolling students from modest backgrounds, keeping costs low, and producing strong outcomes. FAU does all three, making it one of the greatest success stories in American higher education.

Students from median-income families pay just $5,624 to attend Florida Atlantic. That’s lower than what many community colleges in other states charge after financial aid. FAU’s admission policy is also nearly as open as a community college, with an acceptance rate north of 70 percent—a far cry from the 24 percent acceptance rate of the state’s flagship, the University of Florida. And nearly 9,000 of FAU’s 31,000 students receive Pell Grants. 

Open-access schools like this tend to have low graduation rates and post-college student earnings. By contrast, Florida Atlantic ranks in the top 20 percent nationally for student outcomes. Graduates finish their degrees at above-average rates and earn solid wages in fields like business development, marketing, engineering, and information technology. Nearly one in five graduates earns a degree in a service-oriented field—education, nursing, social work, or public health. These are the professionals who keep South Florida’s schools, clinics, and communities running. FAU has also earned R1 research status—the highest classification a research university can receive—and built standout programs in fields like ocean engineering, neuroscience, and health sciences.

FAU’s campus was built in the early 1960s on the site of the Boca Raton Army Airfield, a World War II–era military installation used to train radar operators and patrol the Atlantic coast. (The airfield itself had been created on land seized during the war—5,800 acres taken through eminent domain from Japanese American farmers who had settled in the area as part of the early-20th-century Yamato Colony.) Today, remnants of the base—such as old runways—still mark the Boca campus, a quiet reminder of the fraught and layered history behind Florida’s postwar boom.

In 2023, the men’s basketball team grabbed national headlines with a Cinderella run to the Final Four. But the real story is what’s happened off the court: Florida Atlantic University has quietly become one of the country’s most effective engines of upward mobility.

University of Illinois Chicago

Schools that combine accessibility, affordability, and strong outcomes and that serve large numbers of students are hard to come by, especially in the Midwest. The University of Illinois Chicago is one of the rare exceptions.

UIC’s undergraduate program began as a makeshift operation for returning World War II veterans who traveled by streetcar to exhibition halls at Navy Pier. It moved to its present home on the city’s Near West Side in the early 1960s as part of a controversial urban renewal project spearheaded by Chicago’s then Mayor Richard J. Daley. It is located just southwest of what used to be called the Circle Interchange, where the city’s three major expressways connect. Chicagoans of a certain age still refer to it as Circle Campus, and while the wall of interstates can make it feel isolated, the university is now at the outer edge of some of the city’s hippest and fastest-growing neighborhoods.

UIC has also become a full-fledged research university with more than 30,000 students, most hailing from Illinois and nearly 40 percent from Chicago public schools. A large majority identify as Black, Hispanic, Asian, or multiracial, and more than 10,000 receive Pell Grants. That’s 22 percent more than other universities with similar demographics, a testament to UIC’s commitment to serve non-wealthy students.

UIC accepts nearly 80 percent of applicants, and while its graduation rate (70 percent over eight years) keeps its outcomes in the middle of the pack, students still earn an average of $57,439 a decade after enrolling—a better return than many public flagships and private institutions that serve far more privileged student bodies.

Just as important: It’s affordable. After financial aid, the average student pays less than $10,000 a year—a rare number for any major research university, especially one located in a large metro area. Starting in fall 2025, UIC is also offering free tuition to any student who is a citizen and an Illinois resident from a family earning less than $75,000.

It also happens to be one of the most quietly productive research institutions in the country. The university spends $360 million a year on research (55th in the nation in research expenditures) and ranks 51st in science and engineering PhDs awarded. That level of research output, combined with broad access and real affordability, is increasingly rare in American higher education.

In our rankings, UIC comes in at number 40 overall, ahead of many bigger-name schools—not because it’s the wealthiest or most selective, but because it does what public universities were built to do: make high-quality education available to a broad group of students, at a price they can afford, with a real chance of success.  

University of California Berkeley

Berkeley has long been the crown jewel of public higher education. From the adoption of the California Master Plan for Higher Education in 1960, Berkeley has embodied its boldest ideal: that a child from any background, given the right education, could rise as high as their talent would take them. And remarkably, in an era when many public flagships have drifted toward exclusivity and prestige-chasing, Berkeley still walks the line between excellence and access. The school educates a large number of non-wealthy students at a relatively low cost, and does it well.

More than 8,600 Berkeley undergraduates receive Pell Grants. Its access rank of 51 is impressive for such a prestigious institution. Students from median-income backgrounds pay an average net price of just under $10,000—a relative bargain given the school’s stellar reputation—and graduate with one of the lowest debt loads in the country (about $13,300 on average).

Still, the numbers only partially capture the story. Outcomes, as measured by our data, are in the top 20 percent: The school ranks 240th. That number would be even higher if so many graduates didn’t go on to get advanced degrees. Berkeley is third in the country at producing STEM PhDs, and seventh overall on our research rankings.

Its service ranking—number 628—is a weak spot. Berkeley does not hold the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification, and only a modest share of federal work study funding goes toward public service. For a campus that birthed the free speech movement, the institutional support for civic engagement is surprisingly thin. Much of the activism and community work comes from students themselves, not the university’s infrastructure.

And yet, Berkeley remains an engine of upward mobility and intellectual firepower. It sends more undergraduates on to doctoral programs than nearly any other institution. Its faculty includes Nobel laureates, MacArthur Fellows, and field-defining scholars. (The school ranks sixth on our faculty accolades measure.) Its alumni power the state’s economy, government, and cultural institutions. And its student body—diverse, sharp edged, politically engaged—reflects California at its most ambitious and unsettled.

Boricua College

Just a few blocks north from Columbia in Upper Manhattan, this tiny college for adult continuing education is posting impressive results. Boricua was founded in 1974 by a group of community organizers and educators to serve the Puerto Rican community. (You might know the area around its main campus, Washington Heights, from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical In the Heights.) For most of the students who attend Boricua, success is not guaranteed by wealth or privilege—which is why the school brags about helping them to “Earn It.”

Boricua is an institution built to offer non-wealthy people that pathway to success. A high proportion of students are on Pell Grants, and many are also adults. (The school accepts almost everyone who applies.) They graduate at a much higher rate than average for their background, making Boricua the fourth-best school in America at getting diplomas to those who otherwise wouldn’t earn them. Unlike their peers in Morningside Heights, Boricua grads don’t jump straight into lucrative careers in consulting and finance—and their post-college incomes reflect that, at an average $31,768. But these graduates are more often going on to serve their communities by working as teachers, daycare providers, and activists. And with the fourth-lowest post-college debt in the country, they have room to maneuver, too.

With its unusual mission comes a unique teaching style. Boricua uses a holistic system that focuses on “critical thinking” and professional training in a variety of classroom settings from small, 8-to-10-person “colloquia” to cultural studies classes to hands-on experiential workshops. Recognizing the needs of its community, the college provides a laptop and printer to every new student.

Boricua’s model has quietly gathered respect over the years, leading it to expand to locations in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. (Though Washington Heights hosts the current main campus, the original site is in Williamsburg.) All the while, it has honored the culture of Puerto Rico and other Hispanic ethnicities, hosting art exhibitions and taking part in the city’s famous annual Puerto Rican Day Parade. All of this adds up to a school devoted to its community. Whether by lifting up its people, celebrating its culture, or building its institutions, Boricua exemplifies the values of the Monthly’s college rankings. 

Northeastern State University

Tahlequah is the capital of the Cherokee Nation, which after removal from its homeland in the 1830s founded a women’s seminary there to help rebuild its uprooted institutions. In 1909, the state bought the buildings and grounds to create Northeastern State, which to this day honors this legacy. More than a quarter of NSU’s 8,000 students identify as Native American, and a similar proportion are on Pell Grants.

Ninety-nine percent of applicants are accepted. Students pay low prices and leave with little debt—in both cases, better than 90 percent of American schools. Their incomes exceed expectations, too. Where Northeastern State really stands out, however, is in graduation rates, which are 15 percent higher than expected based on college preparation and economic background. That makes the university America’s 19th best at helping students to cross the commencement stage. 

While its social mobility stats are impressive, Northeastern State’s record in service is even better. A whopping 40 percent of federal work study funds are spent on community service jobs, which means that the university is extremely conscientious about ensuring that its students give back to the community. Respectable numbers of students serve their country through ROTC, and fully a third pursue a service-oriented major like teaching or social work.

NSU has three campuses. At the main Tahlequah location, students can row or charter a float on the Illinois River. There’s hiking nearby, as well as the Center for Tribal Studies, which celebrates Cherokee heritage and offers internships and fellowships for students interested in contributing to the community. Every year, the Tahlequah and Broken Arrow campuses participate in the “Big Event”—a massive day of service that involves “painting houses, raking, weeding, cleaning, washing windows, working school carnivals and much more.” The Muskogee campus advertises access to more tribal museums and culture, golf courses, and a festival venue that doubles as a fireworks emporium known as the “Castle of Muskogee.”

Serving its community is NSU’s specialty, and although that doesn’t garner the prestige of some richer schools, we think it’s exemplary.

Metropolitan State University

As part of its 50th anniversary in 2021, Metropolitan State University rebranded … sort of. Aside from shortening its name to “Metro State,” the school mostly reaffirmed its roots as a public university for older, nontraditional students that provides a “barrier-breaking higher education.”

Located in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and not to be confused with the similarly named Metropolitan State University of Denver, Metro State serves just over 8,000 students. Its acceptance rate is 96 percent, and about a third of the students are on Pell Grants. Illustrating Metro State’s commitment to serving underprivileged populations, those students graduate at about the same rate as the overall student body, which is far ahead of what’s statistically expected for their background. They pay middle-of-the-road prices—$17,614 annually, counting aid—and as early-career graduates, they earn a whopping $10,000 more than people with a similar education level.

The higher salaries likely reflect the school’s older population, who are often further along in their careers, as well as Metro State’s classification as a “professions focused” school. Roughly half of students attend part-time. But the numbers also reflect the incomes in their most common chosen majors—like technology, computer science, nursing, and business administration. In 2023, Metro State won a $1.45 million grant from the National Security Agency to create a cybersecurity clinic to help small businesses, K–12 schools, nonprofits, and governmental bodies to protect themselves from cyberattacks. 

Metro State also performs admirably in our service metrics, with respectable numbers of students entering national programs like AmeriCorps and majoring in fields like teaching and social work. On campus, the university culture isn’t particularly close-knit, nor is it much for quirky traditions. Students often have lives elsewhere. To reflect that, classes are small, with flexible schedules. Metro State is close to the center of St. Paul, which means that all the wonders of the Twin Cities are within easy reach.

One of the school’s former presidents is Reatha Clark King, a retired research chemist who was one of the “hidden figures” in America’s 1969 lunar landing program, and the first Black woman to serve as president of a college in Minnesota. She helped grow the school from a barely accredited upstart to a thriving professional college—and to this day, it follows in her barrier-breaking steps.

CUNY Lehman College

In terms of economic fundamentals, this sprawling campus in the Bronx is better than practically any regional college.

Lehman College, part of the City University of New York system, serves a high number of needy students—close to half the population are on Pell Grants. The school offers them one of the lowest net prices in the country ($3,115 a year, counting aid) and sends them into the workforce with among the lowest levels of debt ($10,864). That makes Lehman the sixth-most-affordable school in America. Students graduate at higher rates than predicted by college preparation and earn more than expected—significantly more, around $4,500—in their early careers.

Students tend not to join national service programs, though high numbers major in areas like teaching and social work. The acceptance rate is 55 percent, slightly low for a school of its profile and perhaps reflecting high demand.

Lehman’s academics are meant to produce versatile, well-rounded adults, with a core curriculum that touches on writing, mathematics, foreign language, and natural sciences, as well as two special courses, unique to the college, that promote critical thinking. A small number of honors “Lehman Scholars” are able to build their own course of study if they pass a rigorous application process. Like many of the CUNYs, Lehman is a bit of a commuter school, but the college has dozens of clubs and organizations for students, from the Mycology Club to Aporia, a philosophy discussion group. The New York Botanical Garden is a few blocks away, and the art, culture, and nightlife of New York City are just beyond.

Towson University

Eight miles from downtown Baltimore, Maryland’s second-largest public university outranks its flagship cousin, UMD in College Park, thanks to an all-around solid performance in social mobility and a particular focus on graduating students on time.

Towson’s acceptance rate is high, at 82.8 percent. More than a quarter of students there rely on federal aid, unlike at College Park, where the proportion is half that. The net cost of a Towson education is comparatively low for a non-wealthy school—about $9,000 a year—and students leave with low debt and better-than-expected earnings. Towson’s standout measure, however, is its graduation rate. Compared to others with the same level of income and preparation, Towson students graduate at an 11 percent higher rate. If you compare that performance gap across all American schools, Towson comes in 66th, an impressive distinction for a little-known state school. 

In terms of service, Towson performs admirably, with decent numbers of ROTC cadets and a strong commitment to student voting, according to the Monthly’s data. Towson was founded as a “normal school” for teachers, and continues to produce the most teachers of any Maryland college. The school also runs several outreach programs to nearby Baltimore, including the Cherry Hill Learning Zone, a partnership with city schools and community organizations to rebuild the southern neighborhood of Cherry Hill.

Towson has a respectable campus life for a commuter-heavy state college, with 85 percent of freshmen living on campus (though they tend to move away later). Athletics are a cornerstone of school spirit, with students proudly rallying around the college mascot, Doc the Tiger, and a bronze tiger statue that towers over campus. In late April, TigerFest brings headline musical acts to campus, including Lil Yachty, Playboi Carti, Kid Cudi, and Yellowcard.

As in so many cases, it’s the nearby regional public school that does the grunt work of shepherding non-wealthy students into the workforce at low cost, without receiving the same acclaim as its flagship sibling. UMD–College Park has millions in research dollars, scores of partnerships with the federal government, and illustrious alumni like Google’s Sergey Brin—and we herald those accomplishments. But Towson also has the enduring gratitude of generations of roaring Tigers.

SUNY Geneseo

This SUNY branch in the Finger Lakes region of upper New York has long been a favorite in our rankings, but not for the usual reasons. Many of the top performers in the Monthly’s list make it there because of advantages in access and affordability. They have low prices, high rates of non-wealthy students, and low levels of debt after graduation. While SUNY Geneseo performs well in those stats, it’s the outcomes that really shine.

Geneseo graduates overperform in terms of early-career income, to the tune of about $5,400 annually compared to statistical predictions. They also go on to earn higher degrees at startlingly high rates for a non-elite school—about the same rate as graduates of Tufts, a major research university. About 90 percent of faculty have PhDs themselves, and the school’s rigorous academics—it bills itself as an “honors college”—focus on critical thinking, building skills for careers, and public service.

The school does even better in our service list, with high numbers of students (it is ranked 51st) entering AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps after college. On campus, students brave chilly upstate New York winters and hilly hikes between classes in exchange for access to some of the Northeast’s most beautiful natural vistas. Day trips to Rochester, Buffalo (and Niagara Falls), and the area’s pristine lakes are not uncommon.

With its focus on service and lifelong academic inquiry, Geneseo is squarely in line with the SUNY system motto: “To Learn, to Search, to Serve.”

Rutgers University-Camden

Rutgers–Camden might not have the name recognition of Princeton or even Rutgers–New Brunswick, the system’s flagship. It doesn’t enroll tens of thousands of students, and you won’t find it on ESPN most Saturdays. But if you’re looking for a school that delivers a strong return on investment—especially for students who don’t come from wealthy families—this smaller urban campus deserves a close look.

Students who attend Rutgers–Camden tend to graduate and find solid jobs. In our rankings, the school performs especially well on what we call “outcomes”—a category that includes graduation rates and how much alumni earn after college. That’s not just good news for students; it’s a signal that a degree from Rutgers–Camden means something in the real world. Whether graduates are going into law, health care, business, or government, they tend to land on their feet.

It’s also a campus with a clear civic purpose. About one in five graduates earns a degree in fields like education, social work, or public service. And Rutgers–Camden has earned national recognition for its commitment to the local community, partnering with nonprofits, public schools, and civic organizations across Camden and the surrounding region.

Financially, Rutgers–Camden falls in the middle of the pack. Students from non-wealthy families—those who qualify for Pell Grants—pay an average of $12,332 per year and graduate with student loan debt around $4,000 less than the national average. That’s not particularly cheap on our rankings, but it’s far more affordable than many private or flagship public institutions, especially in the Northeast. And with strong job outcomes, the investment pays off.

Around 2,200 students receive Pell Grants—more than a third of the students enrolled. The relatively high admission rate (78 percent) means that students who are academically qualified have a strong chance of getting in.

What you get in return is a tight-knit public research university with a clear sense of mission. Classes are small, faculty are accessible, and students can take advantage of Rutgers’s broader academic resources while staying grounded in a local, community-focused campus.

Rutgers–Camden doesn’t have the prestige of its flagship sibling—or the glitz of a brand-name private college. But it offers something else: a high-quality education that helps students move up, give back, and stay out of excessive debt. For students who want a meaningful degree at a public university that still believes in public service, it’s a compelling choice.

Appalachian State University

As its name suggests, Appalachian State University lies in the “high country” of North Carolina, a region known for beautiful vistas, a bustling logging industry, and limited economic opportunity. In 2023 census estimates, 18.6 percent of Watauga County lived under the poverty line, well above the national average of 11.1 percent. That gives Appalachian State a formidable task—to serve a population with significant needs by offering them an affordable pipeline to the workforce, in a region that is hardly overflowing with options. We believe that the university has succeeded admirably.

Out of a student body of 21,570, about a quarter are on Pell Grants. Though the school is not awash in money, it is able to keep prices reasonably low, at an annual $10,681 including aid. That makes Appalachian State 263rd in net price—a very respectable rank for an institution with its finances and level of student need. Graduates leave with an average $20,334 in debt, and make close to what you’d expect for degree holders of their background and region.

Perhaps unsurprisingly in an economically struggling area, many students seek out military service as a potential pathway. Appalachian State has high numbers of ROTC enrollees, giving it a service score above many of its peers in the Monthly’s rankings. In short, although it isn’t sending its average student on to a lucrative and prestigious career, it is pushing them upward in the ladder of life by keeping their costs low and their access to a respectable education easy. (That applies to its admission process, too, where 89 percent gain acceptance.) 

And in the meantime, Appalachian State has itself become an economic mainstay for the region. A labor analytics firm estimated in 2023 that the university added $573 million to the surrounding five counties and $2.2 billion to the state through its own operations, construction projects, student spending, and the economic contributions of its alumni.

To current students, a vibrant campus culture and the beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains offer a full and rewarding college experience. Nearby, there’s hiking, rock climbing, skiing, camping, rafting, and fishing. The 40-year-old student union, the Appalachian Popular Programming Society, organizes concerts, parties, and exhibitions. Each year, students run the “Neerly Naked Mile,” a semi-undressed race for charity that recognizes the challenges many in the region face in putting clothes on their back. That’s the spirit of Appalachian State: celebrating what’s unique about its community, while taking every opportunity to lift it up.

Mississippi University for Women

The W,” as its 2,200 students call it, was founded in 1884 as one of the first publicly supported schools for women in America. It was regarded as a “godsend,” a legislator once said, “for the poor girls of Mississippi.” These days, close to a quarter of students are men. But the W stays true to its economic mission.

Forty percent of undergraduates are on Pell Grants, a very high proportion of non-wealthy students. The university accepts pretty much everyone who applies, and charges them a reasonably low net price—about $11,000 annually. But its standout accomplishment is the low debt with which its graduates leave: an average of $15,000. That puts the W at 70th in the nation, ahead of venerated names like Northwestern, University of Chicago, and Cal Tech. The W also overperforms in getting its students to graduate on time. Earnings just about meet expectations, and students’ participation in service is middle of the road. Where MUW really excels is getting degrees into the hands of Mississippi’s working and middle classes—on time, at low cost, with little debt.

The university has a well-renowned nursing program, ranked first in the state and one of the few disciplines where admission is competitive. Befitting a southern school, MUW has several Greek organizations and a number of whimsically named social clubs: the Lockhearts, the Mam’selles, the Rev’s, the Silly’s, the Troub’s (short for Troubadours). During commencement, new graduates carry a chain of magnolias down the aisle to symbolize their accomplishments—a tradition dating to 1890.

The W also has a legacy of artistic, legal, medical, and civic excellence. A long list of women alumni were trailblazers in the courts and on the written page, not least Eudora Welty, the Pulitzer-winning chronicler of the South. A daughter of Jackson, Mississippi, Welty once described her own writing this way: “My continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other’s presence.” It could equally apply to her alma mater’s dedication to humanity.

Evergreen State College

This nontraditional liberal arts college in Olympia, the capital of Washington State, earns a high place in our rankings thanks to the extraordinary outcomes it provides to a student body of everyday means.

Almost everyone who applies gets in. Of Evergreen’s 2,505 students, a third are on Pell Grants. Though the college has a fairly high net price of $20,420, its graduates leave without a crushing amount of debt. It only gets better from there. Evergreen graduates greatly overperform in earnings, making almost $11,000 more in their early careers than peers with similar educations and socioeconomic backgrounds. Many go on to earn PhDs and to participate in national service programs like AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps.

What’s Evergreen’s secret? Academics is part of it. All students have the option to design their own curriculum or follow a traditional path of study, in either case closely guided by faculty advisers. There are no majors or letter grades. From that base has sprung an incredible outburst of creativity, with alumni who include Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons; the rapper Macklemore; the Oscar-winning director Byron Howard; and a generation of grunge icons including members of the bands Sleater-Kinney and Bikini Kill.

Olympia sits within a bus ride of Seattle near the base of Puget Sound. Natural wonders aren’t far from campus, and a rich arts community flourishes in the state capital, where students also have the opportunity to learn about public service and the workings of state government. In keeping with its origins as an experimental college of the 1960s, Evergreen has a number of nontraditional traditions, including Speedy the Geoduck, a burrowing clam who serves as the college mascot and is known for his unique catchphrase: “Gurgle … blurp … blurp.” (Don’t ask.)

Whatever goes on in the minds of Evergreen State students, it’s leading them to success. Shoulder the cost of its education, and it’ll pay dividends, both in hard numbers and in the creativity it can unlock.

Blue Field State University

This small public university in West Virginia coal country earns its place in the Washington Monthly’s top 200 through the quality and affordability of the education it provides to everyday people.

Founded in 1895 as a “high-graded school” for Black Americans in the segregated South, Bluefield became a cultural mecca by the middle of the next century. Joe Louis held boxing exhibitions there, Langston Hughes read poetry, and Count Basie and Duke Ellison played at fraternity parties. Today, Bluefield remains racially diverse but has more students of European descent, who were attracted by its high quality and low cost after integration in the 1950s.

Close to half of Bluefield’s 1,300 students are on Pell Grants. Admission is fairly easy; 87 percent of applicants are accepted. They pay a respectable amount ($10,079 when factoring in loans), graduate at higher rates than expected, and do so without crushing debt. In all of those statistics, Bluefield has a rank around 200—a strong performance out of more than 1,400 schools, and a deeply valuable contribution in a community where roughly one in five people lives in poverty.

Bluefield students score high in their commitment to service. More than half in areas like education and social work, and a high proportion of its work study students, focus their efforts on community service. In other ways, the school’s graduates post middling results. They earn modest incomes—$33,727 nine years after enrolling, which slightly underperforms expectations. They earn postgraduate degrees and enter national service programs like AmeriCorps and ROTC at rates in the middle of our rankings.

One hundred and thirty years of tradition await students who embrace the “Big Blue.” Before each final exam period, the school hosts the free “Almost Midnight Breakfast.” At football games, students take selfies with Sir Blue, a Great Dane who serves as mascot and cheers on the team. No wonder that its proud students and alumni are eager to follow Bluefield’s motto and “Accept the Challenge.”

Elizabeth City State University

Elizabeth City is an old favorite in the Monthly’s College Guide. Back in 2012, it topped our list of baccalaureate-granting institutions, and this year it cracks the top 200 thanks to the extraordinarily low cost at which it provides an education.

Part of the University of North Carolina system, the 134-year-old historically Black school charges one of the lowest rates in the nation—$3,797 after aid. The state university system’s NC Promise program keeps tuition dirt cheap at Elizabeth City and three other state colleges—$500 for in-state students. Each year, roughly 1,000 students on Pell Grants are attracted by the school’s favorable economics (out of a total population of 2,261). Forty-three percent graduate within eight years, which is more than statistically expected. Most applicants—about 70 percent—earn admission. The debt and earnings of Elizabeth City grads fall smack in the middle of the table. Where the school really excels is providing access to non-wealthy students and keeping their costs low.

As the Monthly noted in 2012, Elizabeth City carefully caters to a student body whose academic preparation reflects the struggles of K–12 schools in its region. To make sure new students succeed, the school brings them to campus before they matriculate to get used to the college experience. And it looks closely for warning signs that a student is in danger of dropping out. Strong local traditions bind students to Elizabeth City State: a matriculation ceremony that until not long ago was conducted by candlelight, and, in the harbor town that bears the same name, the annual “Moth Boat Regatta” in October. (Moth boats are tiny, speedy sailboats that became popular for recreation in Elizabeth City in the 1920s and ’30s.)

As the school’s chancellor, Karrie G. Dixon, said in a statement in 2021, “People are taking note that we are providing access to a high-quality education at an affordable price.” We certainly are.

The post 25 Best-in-Class Colleges appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Florida is a national leader in higher education, with universities that focus intently on success—and achieve it. Surprised? That’s understandable. Florida is known for many things—theme parks, retirement communities, deer-eating pythons—but academic excellence is typically not one of them. The state boasts no prestigious Ivy League–like schools. To the extent that it has a collegiate reputation, it is as a mecca for out-of-state students who come to get blotto during spring break.

Yet, the numbers don’t lie. In the Washington Monthly’s 2025 Best Colleges for Your Tuition (and Tax) Dollars, seven Florida universities rank in the top 100 (out of more than 1,400 schools). These include Florida International University (number eight), University of Central Florida (17), and New College (25), all of them public institutions. Four Florida state universities also make the Monthly’s 2025 Best Colleges for Research ranking, including the University of Florida (number 27) and Florida State (76). And 10 of the top 20 colleges on the Monthly’s Best Bang for the Buck ranking for the Southeast are in Florida.

Why do so many Florida universities do so well on the magazine’s rankings? Part of it is that Florida is a populous state with lots of universities. But Michigan and Pennsylvania have about the same combined population as Florida (23 million). Yet only two Pennsylvania colleges, both private—Haverford (19) and Swarthmore (37)—make the top 100 in the Monthly’s Best Colleges for Your Tuition (and Tax) Dollars, and none from Michigan do.

You might also wonder if Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s famously aggressive crackdown on faculty and curriculum he deems “woke” has anything to do with the state’s high rankings. The answer is no. Florida universities did well on the Monthly’s rankings years before DeSantis was elected governor, and the data underlying the 2025 rankings comes largely from actions before his tenure.

The real explanation for Florida’s stellar performance is the way the state has traditionally governed its public higher education system. Like other states whose universities are disproportionately represented at the top of the Monthly’s rankings—including California, North Carolina, Texas, and New York—Florida has a long history of centralized state control of its public colleges and universities and an abiding commitment to keeping tuition low, especially for in-state students of modest means. By organizing around a governing board, Florida leaders have standardized policies and practices across all universities which set the conditions for students to excel, give presidents the ability to lead difficult change without fear of campus retribution, and most importantly, empower every university in the system to provide the state’s citizens with a high-quality experience.

I’ve seen these measures firsthand, as a student from a low-income family who graduated from the University of Florida debt-free and later as a senior administrator in the Florida higher education system. I think that other states have a lot to learn from how we do things in Florida, especially at a time when many Americans believe education after high school is no longer affordable, accessible, or equitable and aren’t sure of a degree’s value in the workforce. But these lessons come with a warning: The same centralized governance system that has helped Florida higher education leaders serve students so well is also the means by which Florida politicians are imposing a conservative ideological agenda in the classroom.

Florida’s tradition of strong state control of institutions of higher learning goes back more than a century. In 1905, state lawmakers, concerned that a proliferation of colleges was putting a financial drain on the state, cut the number in half and placed them under the thumb of the Florida Board of Control, whose members were appointed by the governor. In the post–World War II years, as college access expanded nationwide, Florida opened dozens of new four-year and two-year campuses. Then, in 1965, the state put the universities under the authority of a new entity, the Board of Regents, which had even greater powers to organize the emerging system.

Under a comprehensive plan in 1969, each institution was given a particular role to play within the larger system. For example, Florida Atlantic University was envisioned to be “a general purpose university established to serve the students in its region. Its unique role in the University System, however, is to experiment with new and innovative instructional media and technology.” In the late 1960s, just on the other side of I-95 from FAU, IBM began building a complex on 550 acres. From the sky one sees the clear, symbiotic relationship between industry and education. 

At roughly the same time, Florida instituted a reform that would profoundly enhance the ability of students to earn four-year degrees while saving money. Dubbed the 2+2 system, it was intended to help students attend lower-cost Florida community colleges for two years and then transfer to bachelor’s degree–granting institutions without losing credits along the way. It did so by, among other things, imposing a common statewide course-numbering system. In practice this meant that the same course—say English (ENC 1101)—counted as credit toward every degree in every two- and four-year public college and university in the state. This deprived four-year universities of revenue they got from demanding that students repeat courses they had taken in community college, and it kept costs down for students and taxpayers. Florida today has one of the highest percentages of its undergraduates in community college and is one of eight states with the highest percentage of community college students who transfer to four-year universities.

The centralized system reduced costs and enhanced student achievement in other ways. When several state universities asked for permission to open law schools—a costly but prestige-enhancing undertaking—the Board of Regents said no, based on a study showing that the state’s need for attorneys was being met by existing Florida law schools and lawyers trained in other states who were moving to Florida and passing the state bar exam. In 1972, the board implemented a process for ending any academic program enrolling too few students to make it viable—decades ahead of similar efforts like those at West Virginia University. The net result was programs merging with other programs or being canceled.

The board also cracked down on the practice of universities requiring students to take more courses than necessary for their degree by placing a maximum on the number of credits it would provide state support for an academic program. This action also reduced institutional revenues but helped more students graduate, more quickly—and therefore at less cost.

Over time, the state adopted other mechanisms that reduced tuition and fees received by the universities but helped keep costs down for students. These included early admission for high school juniors, dual admission/credit, credit for prior learning, and the waiving of introductory college courses for advanced students.

In other states, flagship universities typically grab the lion’s share of state funding, thanks to greater lobbying power with state legislators, depriving regional public universities of revenue. In Florida, the Board of Regents, not lawmakers, controlled the divvying up of funding among public universities. In 1975, the board resolved that “no university be relegated to second class status because of funding inequities” and enforced that principle with a cost-based funding model that paid each university the same amount for the same activities—a legacy that laid the foundation for today.

In other states, universities use so-called merit aid to lure students from affluent families who can pay higher overall tuition, thus depriving students from poorer families of the financial aid they need. In 1997, the Florida legislature created a merit aid program funded by lottery revenues that was specifically targeted to high-achieving students. Over the ensuing years, this Bright Futures Scholarship Program evolved, supporting more than 1 million students, including members of my own family.

The centralized system, which kept the key decisions of Florida’s higher education outside of the battleground of politics (the legislature), never made anyone—universities, legislature, governors, or faculty—fully happy. So, in 2001, university leaders who were aligned with the legislature and incoming Governor Jeb Bush abolished the Board of Regents and devolved power to specific universities, which were given their own boards of trustees. Fearing that universities would become less efficient and effective, then U.S. Senator and former Florida Governor Bob Graham led the charge to pass a constitutional amendment recentralizing authority into a new and more powerful board of governors. The referendum was adopted in 2002.

Three years later, when the Washington Monthly published its first college rankings, Florida universities did well. The University of Florida ranked 30th out of 245 national universities, ahead of Columbia, Rice, and Dartmouth. Other Florida institutions placed respectably (University of South Florida at 131, Florida International University at 149). In subsequent years, most Florida schools improved their positions, often substantially. Part of the reason was that the magazine incorporated new federal data—for instance, on student earnings after college—that better revealed the superior job Florida universities had long been doing. But part of it was continuing improvements to the Florida system.

I joined the Florida Board of Governors staff in 2013, after working on federal policy issues in Washington, and witnessed those improvements firsthand. One was a performance-funding model that infused hundreds of millions of dollars into the system. Approved in January 2014, and evolving over the ensuing years, the model includes 10 metrics that evaluate schools on statewide goals while leaving space for university boards of trustees to develop metrics important to their own institutions. Another was a “pre-eminence” program that gives extra money to universities that meet tough benchmarks, including certain graduation rates.

Other states allow their public universities great leeway to charge different students different prices for the same degrees. This helps maximize tuition revenue for universities but forces students to untangle high sticker prices with discounts and other types of aid, making it hard for them to comparison-shop. Florida doesn’t permit substantially different tuition pricing. Under a 2010 agreement, the legislature sets a base tuition rate and allows universities the ability to charge no more than 15 percent above that amount.

With control over tuition and fees, and institutional boards of trustees appointed by the governor, the state leadership has a powerful tool to keep costs down. In fact, since Governor Rick Scott first held tuition flat in 2014, the price has remained virtually unchanged.

In a nutshell: Rather than have universities compete on tuition sticker prices and the related confusing suite of federal, state, institutional, and private aid, Florida chose to hold prices steady to make college affordable. This is bolstered by generous state student aid programs.

Another advancement was the system’s focus on ensuring students were getting jobs. The Board of Governors leveraged a partnership with the state department of labor to create a report on the post-college outcomes of bachelor’s degree earners. Since it was first released in 2013, the report has evolved into “My Florida Future”—a public tool to inform students, leaders and parents.

These advancements, and many others over the years, were a direct result of an empowered governing board, with members mostly chosen by the governor and confirmed by the Florida Senate. The governor and the board also appoint all the trustees of individual public universities, again subject to confirmation by the Senate. This system gives the executive branch the ability to implement changes quickly and directly.

Ron DeSantis has utilized that power in ways no previous governor tried, or perhaps even contemplated. In the past, administrations waded into decisions over curriculum only for the purpose of keeping costs for students down—such as limiting the length of a degree program. DeSantis has fundamentally changed what must and must not be taught in college classrooms, based on conservative views. Previous administrations appointed university presidents and trustees largely based on their professional academic record. DeSantis has increasingly placed ideologically aligned partners and former elected officials in those positions.

In 2023, for instance, he replaced six trustees of New College, a famously progressive (and academically distinguished) institution, vowing to turn the school into a Florida version of conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan. The trustees promptly fired New College’s president, leading 40 percent of the faculty to resign. This spring, when the University of Florida’s trustees voted unanimously to accept as the school’s new president Santa Ono, the former president of the University of Michigan, DeSantis’s handpicked Board of Governors overruled that decision—arguing that Ono was a proponent of DEI, even though he had overseen the dismantling of the University of Michigan’s DEI program.

What this will mean for the future of Florida’s higher education system remains to be seen. So far, DeSantis has not rolled back any of the reforms of previous administrations that have made Florida public colleges affordable.

Meanwhile, other states with conservative governors and legislatures are trying to follow DeSantis’s lead. Often that involves passing laws that centralize executive authority, as Texas recently did with legislation that weakens the power of faculty-controlled university senates. Whether this trend will lead to policies that help average students succeed, or merely heighten the culture wars, remains to be seen. 

For now, however, Florida universities continue to excel.

The post How Florida Universities Became World-Class appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In his 1897 essay, “My Pedagogical Creed,” the philosopher John Dewey declared that education was “the fundamental method of social progress and reform.” It was a bold claim, rooted in the radical optimism of American pragmatism: the idea that public institutions could cultivate democratic citizens, not just credentialed elites. Dewey’s heroes—Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, William James, and Eugene V. Debs—were champions of democracy, imagination, and radical inclusion. Schools, he believed, should not mirror society’s hierarchies, but work to dismantle them. If anything, Dewey’s vision is more urgent now—especially in New York, the nation’s fourth most populous state, where vast racial and economic inequality make the stakes of higher education crystal clear. New York colleges are a perfect case study in how schools can either empower marginalized students or entrench privilege under the banner of progressive ideals.

The Washington Monthly’s annual rankings help distinguish between the two. We evaluate colleges based on what they do for the country: their contributions to social mobility (graduating low-income students into good jobs), public service (such as teaching, military service, or social work), and research (see “America’s Best Colleges for Research”). In short, we evaluate how well colleges are producing democratic citizens. In a state teeming with storied institutions and underrecognized gems, our data reveals which New York colleges are really advancing Dewey’s vision—and which are coasting on rhetoric.

Start with Boricua College (ranked 45th out of 1,421 institutions), a private nonprofit school with campuses in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and the Upper West Side. (See Boricua College in “25 Best-in-Class Colleges.”) Boricua enrolls just over 400 students, most of them Puerto Rican or Latino, most low income, and many parents or working adults. There’s no manicured quad, but the outcomes are quietly remarkable. Despite their challenging circumstances—nearly all students qualify for Pell Grants—they graduate at rates significantly above the national average, with, on average, just $6,313 in debt (student debt rank: fourth). Unlike their peers in Morningside Heights, Boricua grads don’t dive straight into lucrative careers in consulting and finance. They are more often going on to serve their communities by working as teachers, day care providers, and activists. And with some of the lightest debt loads in the country, they have room to maneuver, too. 

Eight miles south of Boricua’s Bronx campus, in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, where a studio apartment rents for $5,000 a month, another New York college offers a different kind of education. The New School (ranked 1,379) was created in 1919 as a radical experiment in democratic learning. Its Progressive Era founders—John Dewey among them, along with Thorstein Veblen (the economist), and Charles Beard (the historian)—all shared the belief that universities could be incubators of democratic life. The New School reflected the priorities of its founders. It became a haven for Jewish intellectuals fleeing fascism and a platform for groundbreaking courses in psychoanalysis, women’s studies, jazz, and film. Margaret Mead, the legendary anthropologist, taught there. Hannah Arendt did too. In its early decades, the school was practically open-access, with low tuition and a focus on adult learners. Most school funding went toward research and education instead of administration. At its best, it was Deweyan education incarnate.

Some things haven’t changed. The New School still has a reputation for innovative teaching and radiates a radical ethos. But it’s less democratic. The school is more selective now—admitting 63 percent of applicants—and far more expensive. The net price for students from median-income families is a staggering $41,403, one of the highest in our rankings. Worse, its graduates earn less, on average, than those from far cheaper public New York colleges like CUNY Hunter College (number 41) or SUNY New Paltz (338). Ten years after enrolling, the typical New School student earns just $45,478—a meager return on such a steep investment.

That cost might be defensible if graduates entered socially vital professions, like they do at Boricua, Hunter, and New Paltz, where 33, 37, and 26 percent of graduates, respectively, major in service-oriented fields. But at the New School, not a single graduate in our data pursued a service major like education or social work, placing it near the bottom of our public service metric. And for all its democratic rhetoric, the school ranks 914th in enrolling Pell Grant recipients. 

The socialist magazine Jacobin put it bluntly: “While students and faculty preserve and contribute to the radical legacy of the New School, its administration now uses this legacy as a marketing device—while practicing a cold neoliberal calculus in its day-to-day operations.”  Dewey’s name may still hang in the air, but his values no longer anchor the institution. Christopher Lasch, the communitarian historian and social critic, might have called the school a training ground for “a new aristocracy of talent”—fluent in the language of equity, but far removed from its material demands. 

This mismatch—high cost, low return, maintenance of social inequity—typifies too much of American higher education. Our rankings offer a way to see that clearly. By examining the best and worst performers in New York, we can identify which institutions truly serve the public and which merely serve themselves. 

Sarah Lawrence College (1,095), located just north of New York City in Bronxville, follows a similar arc. Like the New School, it has a noble legacy. Founded in 1926 to provide a rigorous liberal arts education to women, its pedagogy was also inspired by Dewey’s progressive ideals. From the outset, it rejected the impersonal lecture hall in favor of one-on-one tutorials, small seminars, and “productive leisure” workshops in the arts and humanities. Among the possible options: “French conversation, modeling, art appreciation, crafts, make-up, athletics, music, tap dancing—and also natural dancing—observing stars, typewriting, shorthand, literary club, bird club, public speaking and gardening.” In the 1930s, students ran literacy and civic programs in Yonkers; during World War II, more than 250 joined the College War Board to serve needs in the surrounding communities brought about by the war. The activism continued into the 1960s with civil rights and anti–Vietnam War protests.

But like the New School, Sarah Lawrence has drifted far from its roots. These days, the college has gotten more press around the story of a cult-like scheme orchestrated by a student’s father, which became the subject of viral podcasts and a recent Hulu miniseries, than for its social values. (Less known: Rahm Emanuel—future White House chief of staff, Chicago mayor, and ambassador to Japan—studied ballet there.) The average net price for a student from a median-income family is $22,121—better than the New School, but worse than 1,173 other colleges we rank. The payoff isn’t much better: A decade after enrolling, alumni earn barely more than the average American with only a high school diploma. Just 12 percent of students receive Pell Grants, ranking the college 1,199th on that measure. And just 10 percent graduate with service-oriented majors, ranking the college at number 1,092 on that measure. 

In theory, schools like Sarah Lawrence and the New School promise something nobler than job training. They teach students to think critically, challenge orthodoxies, and resist conformity. And in many ways, they succeed. But for institutions that once defined themselves in opposition to social hierarchy, they now do surprisingly little to disrupt it.

Not all elite colleges fail that test. Columbia University (number 34) enrolls nearly 2,000 Pell Grant recipients and charges them less than $2,500 on average—lower than many public institutions. While the school has recently drawn criticism for its handling of campus protests and now faces serious funding threats under the Trump administration, the school proves that prestige and equity aren’t inherently at odds. Similarly, Cornell University (13) manages to keep costs and debt low for median-income students who make it through the rigorous admissions gauntlet. New York University (ranked 155) is more of a mixed case. It enrolls over 5,000 Pell students—more than any other private university in New York—but charges them nearly $20,000 annually. The result: NYU’s ranking is lower than most elite schools but far from the bottom.

Still, the most faithful stewards of Dewey’s legacy, like Boricua College, are often the least celebrated. John Jay College of Criminal Justice (at number 88), part of the CUNY system, has no glossy monthly magazine and few celebrity alums—with the exception of, perhaps most notably, NYC Mayor Eric Adams. But it enrolls a student body that is over 75 percent nonwhite, half first-generation, and largely working class. The net price for median-income students is just $2,661, and its graduates pursue public service careers—law enforcement, social work, legal aid—at rates that elite colleges can’t match.

Other high-performing New York colleges include SUNY Old Westbury (213), SUNY Geneseo (98), and CUNY Lehman College (65). All combine solid affordability, solid outcomes, and diverse student bodies. Hunter College (41), one of the highest ranked in our system, educates over 9,000 Pell recipients—more than the entire undergraduate population of Columbia.

“There has always been a privileged class, even in America,” Lasch wrote in his 1995 book, The Revolt of the Elites. “But it has never been so dangerously isolated from its surroundings.” That’s the true scandal of elite progressive colleges today. It’s not that they’ve strayed from their values—it’s that lesser-known institutions are living those values more fully, and getting none of the glory. 

Dewey believed democracy had to be renewed in every generation. That work is still being done at some New York colleges—but just not where most college rankings would have you look.

The post New York Colleges: Best and Worst appeared first on Washington Monthly.

If there is one commonality in our national war over the university, it is an obsession with the feelings of undergraduates. While advocates for free speech insist that a campus climate of fear makes students too anxious to express themselves, advocates for minority students (a shifting coalition that now includes opponents of anti-Semitism) say that without more robust restrictions on speech, some students will suffer psychological distress.

All parties, though, are asking a version of the same question: Do students feel safe? From racists? From woke moralists? From anti-Semites? 

As someone aligned with the free speech camp, I’m concerned that my “team” has too readily followed the lead of DEI advocates in their preoccupation with the feelings of undergraduates, a tendency that has only increased since the events of October 7. We should shift our gaze away from what students are feeling to what their professors are actually doing inside the classroom. Once we know more about the true quality of college teaching, we can construct rankings for students and parents who genuinely care about liberal education.

The partisans of psychological equipoise have engineered countless surveys to gauge the emotional state of our students. Campus climate surveys are the rage. 

Some are created—usually by those with DEI sympathies—to assess the anxieties of minority students. Since 2018, for example, the HEDS (Higher Education Data Sharing Consortium) Campus Climate Survey has been administered to some 320,000 faculty, students, and staff at more than 400 colleges and universities. It is frequently used to assess the efficacy of diversity and inclusion efforts. While universities tend not to release the full results of these surveys to the general public, they generally find that most of their students feel welcome on campus, though those from minority backgrounds are often less positive in their assessments. At my home institution, Claremont McKenna, my sense is that these surveys have tempered the claims of campus advocates who say the campus climate is terrible, even as they show meaningful differences between groups. 

Partly because these DEI-oriented university administrators have been reluctant to fold concerns about self-censorship into their inquiries, free speech advocates have eagerly built their own campus climate surveys. The king of them all is the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) annual College Free Speech Rankings, an important effort to measure students’ comfort expressing ideas on campus. Last year FIRE surveyed more than 58,000 students at 254 universities and colleges. 

The students are asked a battery of questions. Some query students’ views on free speech and how often they self-censor, but many are primarily interested in their emotions. For example, FIRE asks: “How comfortable would you feel doing the following on your campus?” Then students are given a series of five follow-up questions, such as whether they would feel comfortable “disagreeing with a professor” or “expressing your views on a controversial political topic during an in-class discussion.” Students are also asked how often they feel anxious, stressed, depressed, or lonely. 

From such questions and other metrics, FIRE then gives every university and college a “free speech score.” Some institutions, like the University of Chicago, perform relatively well; others, like Harvard and Columbia, perform terribly. In 2024, these venerable places received a 0 on a scale of 100.

No doubt speech climates are too chilly in many universities and colleges, and FIRE should be commended for documenting this problem and making it too difficult to deny. But even so, FIRE’s annual rankings rest too easily on a questionable premise: that the best college is one where all students say they are never uncomfortable expressing themselves. To achieve a truly outstanding FIRE score, campuses need to become almost entirely free of social anxiety.

But this is unreasonable. Emotional discomfort, after all, is normal and inevitable, especially in a fragmented nation. And while it is sometimes a sign that there is something wrong with the campus speech climate, it can also be a sign that professors are taking risks by teaching difficult subjects and raising ideas that cause some intellectual friction and provoke discomfort. 

Perhaps that’s why universities that focus on technical subjects like engineering and science often score well on FIRE surveys. After all, fields like fluid mechanics don’t typically generate ideological debates or multiple interpretive frameworks. Two of the best universities for free speech, according to FIRE, are Michigan Technological University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, ranked second and fifth, respectively. But you shouldn’t go to either place if you’re looking for much political or philosophical discussion.

Similarly, sectarian universities and colleges often provide instruction within a relatively unified worldview and attract students already aligned with that perspective, a fact that may mute their students’ social anxiety around speech. Liberty University, a fundamentalist institution and one of the few Christian ones that still teach young Earth creationism, received a raw free speech score that was considerably higher than Harvard’s. But who thinks Liberty is better than Harvard at providing a liberal education? (This may be why FIRE didn’t rank these sectarian institutions alongside the other universities and colleges. Instead, they were quarantined in a separate listing.) 

As these examples suggest, there is a serious problem with rankings that place so much emphasis on students’ feelings: They tell us almost nothing about the extent to which different viewpoints on contentious issues are taught and discussed in college classrooms. And they don’t tell us how professors are responding to anxious students.

We shouldn’t infer that many issues don’t get discussed in a serious way merely because students express discomfort at speaking up in their classrooms. Anyone who has taught contentious issues these days, as I have, knows that great discussions can take place even when some students are deeply uncomfortable. Indeed, discomfort, as I’ve emphasized, is as much a symptom of a good education as it is an impediment to one. What matters is the extent to which classroom conversations are so crippled by that discomfort that they can’t explore topics deeply and honestly. Classrooms can be educational and marked by anxiety and self-censorship at times. And they can be closed in a relaxed, comfortable climate.

That doesn’t mean that the pervasive anxiety around some topics doesn’t matter; of course it does. And it makes our work more difficult. But just as ships can traverse rough waters, so too can liberal education succeed in a sea of anxiety.

A deeper problem than the campus climate, I suspect, is the curriculum itself, particularly in humanistic fields outside of economics and political science. I fear that the courses in many such disciplines are closing, particularly around the topics that most divide us.

That’s why, in collaboration with some colleagues at the Claremont Colleges, I tapped a database with millions of college syllabi to assess the extent to which issues like racial inequality, the ethics of abortion, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are taught in ways that expose students to broad scholarly disagreements over those issues. 

Our findings are concerning. For example, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is often assigned to college undergraduates—as it should be, given its scholarly and political influence. However, her most prominent and serious academic critics—none of whom, I might add, consider themselves to be conservatives—are rarely assigned alongside it. These include James Forman Jr., author of Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and my colleague Michael Fortner’s Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment, published by Harvard University Press and selected as an “Editors’ Choice” by The New York Times. Our results show that, since their publication, Forman’s and Fortner’s groundbreaking books have been assigned roughly 3.5 percent and 1.5 percent of the time, respectively, alongside The New Jim Crow. What is missing, it seems, is a whole spectrum of non-radical perspectives. And that, we suspect, encourages an essentially Manichaean mind-set in students, one that oversimplifies the problems they will one day inherit. 

I was sensitized to this problem when I taught a course on race and inequality in 2018. To my surprise, none of my students at the Claremont Colleges—many of whom had taken multiple courses on race—had been exposed to Black authors more conservative than Angela Davis and Ta-Nehisi Coates, both of whom were familiar to them. That meant that they had never heard of the greatest Black social scientists of the twentieth century, including William Julius Wilson and Orlando Patterson, among others. Wilson, for example, was president of the American Sociological Association and a National Medal of Science laureate. Patterson holds a chaired professorship in sociology at Harvard and won the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award of the American Sociological Association. These are towering figures in academia. Certainly, Coates is a gifted writer and Davis is by some lights an interesting polemicist. But great social scientists, like Wilson and Patterson, will do far more to help students think in serious ways about inequality. 

The same problem can be found in the teaching of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Among the most popular authors is Rashid Khalidi, the recently retired Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia. Writing as a Palestinian American, Khalidi is a scholar-activist who insists that Jewish claims to Israel rest on an “epic myth.” While students should read Khalidi, his work is rarely paired with voices that are sympathetic to Israel and complicate the story he tells. Instead, his writing is commonly assigned alongside authors who reinforce and amplify his criticisms of Israel, including fellow travelers James Gelvin, Illan Pappe, and Charles Smith.

Of course, there is almost certainly wide curricular variation across institutions. But absent any systematic account of which places really expose students to varied perspectives on the most pressing social and political challenges, it’s hard to know how particular colleges and universities stack up.

This is all to say that we need better college rankings, ones that don’t lean so heavily on campus climate surveys. We need rankings that care less about the feelings of individual students and far more about the extent to which classrooms discuss and consider varied scholarly perspectives on contentious issues, like race, gender, social policy, Israel, and inequality. This seems especially true if we care about how colleges—as institutions—are responding to a generation that is plagued by social anxiety and how well they are preparing their students for citizenship in a fractured nation. 

In other words: We should care more about what professors are doing, and less about what students are feeling. So here are some questions FIRE should be asking students: How often do your professors in the social sciences and humanities assign authors who represent a diverse range of perspectives on contentious political topics like race, gender, inequality, and the like? Do your professors include a range of perspectives on their syllabi? How often do your professors play devil’s advocate when their students refuse to do so? Such questions can be assessed, at least indirectly, by asking students to share their classroom experiences rather than their own emotions. 

While the psychological comfort of our students certainly matters, it’s not the most important indicator of a good liberal education—and, indeed, sometimes psychological discomfort, even, at times, to the point of self-censorship, is its price.

The post Campus Climate Rankings Miss the Point appeared first on Washington Monthly.

During the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump demeaned institutions of higher education as boondoggle bastions of Marxism and scary “DEI” policies while touting the value of vocational education to help Americans get good-paying jobs. Now back in the Oval Office, he has the opportunity to turn his impulses on education into policies. But we’ve seen far more focus on the people he wants to punish than on those he claims he wants to help.

Harvard and Columbia have faced the most vicious attacks, including attempts to rescind federal funding, influence faculty hires, and ban admission of international students. President Trump has even threatened to revoke their accreditation. Beyond those targeted salvos, the tax cut and spending reform law known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill” includes a stiff tax increase on endowments of large, wealthy universities. Trump’s efforts to help bolster and broaden the working class through vocational education have received less attention, which is understandable because the efforts are meager at best. The need to train workers with the skills necessary to find good-paying jobs is always essential, but the need is even more acute today with artificial intelligence and automation rapidly upending the nature of work.

Trump issued an executive order in April titled “Preparing Americans for High-Paying Skilled Trade Jobs of the Future,” signaling a reorientation of education policy.

The executive order didn’t do much on its own. It directed certain cabinet secretaries to produce by late July a set of “strategies to help the American worker” and “identify alternative credentials and assessments to the 4-year college degree that can be mapped to the specific skill needs of prospective employers.” By late August, the secretaries must detail a “plan to reach and surpass 1 million new active apprentices.”

Those plans haven’t been released as of press time, but the Trump administration and congressional Republicans don’t have to wait. They could start investing in more vocational education in the One Big Beautiful Bill. And Trump could show his support for additional investment in his fiscal year 2026 budget, which is supposed to inform Congress’s work on the annual spending bills that keep the federal government functioning.

So why are we seeing far more vocational education cuts than investments?

A major vocational education component of Trump’s budget is consolidating 11 workforce training programs into a singular “Make America Skilled Again” grant program. However, as Paul Fain of the newsletter “The Job” reported, the net result is a $1.64 billion cut—a reduction in workforce training spending of about one-third:

The strong consensus we heard from workforce experts was that the administration’s proposed budget gashing would overshadow efficiencies or other gains that could be realized even with a very well-executed creation of a MASA system. Most say the big plans sound disingenuous alongside an attempt to cut available federal dollars in half.

Trump’s executive order emphasizes support for apprenticeships—on-the-job training programs in the skilled trades that often lead to high-paying jobs—and his budget proposal sets aside 10 percent of his MASA grants for apprenticeships. But the National Skills Coalition, a network of corporations and philanthropic organizations that support “inclusive, high-quality skills training,” is unimpressed: 

Even with the 10 percent requirement set aside for apprenticeship, roughly $296.6 million of the proposed MASA budget, that’s only an $11 million increase from current levels while $1.6 billion is cut from other workforce programs. The result: a modest bump in apprenticeship funding, but a much larger drop in overall training access.

Fain further notes that “even the 10 percent requirement could be below current apprenticeship funding levels.”

The One Big Beautiful Bill has nothing big for vocational education, either, as what is in the bill is less than meets the eye. The Pell Grant program was expanded to include a Workforce Pell Grant, which can be used for short-term job training programs that can be completed in 150 to 600 hours. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the provision would cost about $300 million over a 10-year period, with 100,000 people receiving $2,200 grants by 2034. That average annual cost of $30 million is tiny compared to the rest of the Pell Grant program, which serves more than 7 million students and is expected to cost $38.1 billion in the current fiscal year.

Furthermore, some traditional Pell Grant recipients are already enrolled in short-term vocational programs. The CBO analysis notes that 

using information from community colleges and research on postsecondary education, CBO expects that many of the students already receive Pell Grants because they are enrolled in short-term programs that are “stacked” within longer-term programs that are eligible for Pell grant funding. As a result, under current law, those students can receive Pell grants even if they do not complete the longer-term program.

Vocational education gains with the creation of the Workforce Pell Grant may be negated by losses in the traditional Pell program.

Moreover, the effectiveness of Workforce Pell will be determined by its implementation, and some vocational education advocates are not confident in the Trump administration’s commitment to thoughtful implementation standards. Back in 2021, the Washington Monthly’s Anne Kim counseled that a strong Workforce Pell program could use the approach found in bipartisan legislation written by Democratic Senator Tim Kaine and then Republican Senator Rob Portman, whose “bill explicitly excludes for-profits from receiving short-term Pell and limits program eligibility to sectors where workers are in demand.” Such a firm guardrail for Workforce Pell doesn’t exist in the new law, even though a Republican attempt to include nonaccredited programs was, thankfully, thrown out of the bill by the Senate parliamentarian. According to Inside Higher Ed, Wesley Whistle of the New America think tank “worries students will still be lured into subpar programs at for-profits or slapdash, mass-produced online programs also eligible for the funds.” And Stephanie Cellini, a George Washington University professor who has analyzed the effectiveness of for-profit colleges, “has little faith that workforce Pell’s regulations will do much to discourage unscrupulous providers from benefiting,” Inside Higher Ed reported. “The completion and job-placement thresholds, she said, are ‘easily gameable’ since they’re self-reported.”

The bill will also gut the clean energy tax credit program established in Joe Biden’s administration with the Inflation Reduction Act. What does that have to do with vocational education? The act included bonus credits for apprenticeships in clean energy projects.

Separate from the legislative process, the Trump administration also aims to undermine Biden’s semiconductor manufacturing bill, known as the CHIPS Act. Axios reported earlier this month that “the Trump administration is renegotiating some CHIPS Act awards, and some previously approved deals likely won’t survive.” CHIPS also included $200 million for job training and workforce development, so any rollback in CHIPS will also negatively impact vocational education.

In addition, without legislation, the Trump administration is trying to shut down the Job Corps program, which provides job training, housing, food, and health care to about 25,000 low-income young people at 99 job centers across the country. A Department of Labor order from May 29 shutting down the centers was stayed by court order, and Job Corps participants have filed a class action lawsuit. Trump’s fiscal year 2026 budget also zeroes out the program. 

Job Corps is widely considered to be a flawed program. Kim, for the Monthly, wrote in 2021,

Government audits have been harsh, documenting mismanagement, safety problems, and persistent failures to place trainees into meaningful jobs … Rather than the young people it purports to serve, the program’s biggest beneficiaries may be a tight-knit coterie of for-profit government contractors who administer the program, some of whom have held on to multimillion-dollar contracts for decades.

Kim argued that Job Corps should be reformed and augmented with more promising initiatives like apprenticeship programs. But Trump’s Labor Department officials are doing nothing of the sort. They’re just trying to shut it down without repurposing the money for other vocational education. 

The totality of what the Trump administration and the Republican Congress are doing with vocational education is not a thoughtful approach to lift the poor and raise living standards for the working class. “The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing here,” the apprenticeship advocate Ryan Craig said after Trump’s budget proposal was published. That’s a charitable assessment, presuming that some hand inside the White House or congressional majority is sincerely interested in expanding job opportunities. If there were, concrete action could be taken right now, with real money in the One Big Beautiful Bill for good-quality workforce training programs or constructive Job Corps reforms. 

Trump understands the crude culture war politics of education. Vocational education is manly and leads to jobs that make real things. Liberal arts degrees are for wimpy trust fund babies who don’t contribute to society and don’t deserve support from taxpayer dollars. So, express support for the former and disparage the latter. 

In reality, we need federal support for all kinds of education. There is more than one way to make a living and more than one educational pathway to success. A zero-sum approach is needlessly myopic. But calling the Republican education agenda “zero sum” is far too complimentary, because in their legislation, budget, and executive actions, there is very little addition and an excess of subtraction.

The post Trump’s Vocational Education Con appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When I started at the Department of Education in the 1990s, student loans were a popular middle-class benefit. College affordability or student loan debt were rarely front-page news. Our dingy offices, a converted World War II warehouse, were a daily reminder of how our work seemed overlooked, too. But in those hallways—literally, my desk was in a hallway—we celebrated lower interest rates, fewer loan defaults, and record college enrollments.

When I returned to the Education Department a decade later, reports of deceptive recruiting tactics at for-profit colleges raised new questions about the value of college loans. My bosses wanted to know whether these abuses were widespread. Were they a few bad apples or a rotten orchard?

College degrees still led to huge earnings gains, on average, for students who were awarded them. The Department of Labor economists pegged the value of bachelor’s degrees at $1 million over the course of a career. But there was very little data on the actual payoff from any particular college or program.

Instead, we looked at a simple proxy to measure the program’s value: whether loan balances were growing or shrinking. If interest accrued faster than borrowers could pay it down, that was a problem with student loan debt. We thought that might be the case for about a third of borrowers who recently left school. But the real number gave me a knot in my stomach. It was double our estimate: More than two-thirds of students saw their loans getting bigger, not smaller, over time. And while some caught up after years in repayment, one in three borrowers was still underwater, even on the oldest loans in the analysis.

This data led the Obama administration to set minimum standards for for-profit colleges and career programs, protecting hundreds of thousands of students from unaffordable debts. But there remained a larger question: How many students had education loans they would never pay down—and what would become of them?

In her new book, Sunk Cost, Jillian Berman sets out to explain how student loans went from a widely supported student benefit to a generational grievance. Having covered the student loan industry for more than a decade at the financial news service MarketWatch, Berman explains how the student loan programs evolved, revealing how key policy decisions ultimately affected the lives of individual students.

In Berman’s telling, policy debates have a familiar echo from decade to decade. Political leaders called for the opening of the doors of college to everyone, regardless of income, but few were willing to invest the money necessary to pay college costs. Student loans were how they reconciled lofty ideals with paltry budgets. 

“Lawmakers were interested in expanding access to college,” Berman writes, but “they wanted to keep costs to the government low. Crucially, policymakers were confident that students would benefit financially from their education, which justified the idea that students should be investing in it themselves.” 

President Lyndon B. Johnson created the principal federal student loan program in 1965, saying, “This nation could never rest while the door to knowledge remained closed to any American.” But his student loan program was enacted at a time when Johnson was “trying to hold the budget down,” according to The New York Times.

Johnson, Richard Nixon (who signed Pell Grants into law in 1972), and Jimmy Carter argued that making college affordable was in the country’s and individual students’ best interests. That view changed under Ronald Reagan. As governor, Reagan imposed the first tuition-like charges at the University of California. As president, he starved Pell Grants of funding. As Reagan’s 1988 budget proposal reported, “Students are the principal beneficiaries of their investment in higher education” and therefore should “shoulder most of the costs.”

Other themes echo through the decades: Ostensibly a benefit for students, loan programs were shaped by commercial interests, intentionally providing ample profits to financial institutions. Quality standards were watered down to benefit for-profit colleges. Student aid programs also tolerated or sometimes exacerbated racial disparities, even before the advent of LBJ’s student loan program. The GI Bill funded a segregated system of higher education. Tuition hikes in California and other states coincided with the growing enrollment of students of color. Black students were—and still are—more likely to go into debt, borrow more, and struggle to repay their loans.

To assess these policies, Berman relies on the voices of borrowers. Her reporting is filled with arresting accounts: Some are single mothers piecing together child care around full-time jobs and full-time course loads; others are students lured by false promises and left with unpayable debts, some never finishing, others graduating only to find their degrees worthless, and some carrying student debt into retirement.

Crippling student debt is often painted as the consequence of irresponsible decisions. But, as Berman points out, it usually isn’t a choice at all. Many of these borrowers believed they were enrolled in the cheapest college they could find or that it represented their only option for postsecondary education.

Looking for a chance to be her own boss, Patricia Gary enrolled in a Bronx beauty school. The instruction was poor, and she dropped out owing $6,000. Over the next 30 years, as an educator and social worker, she repaid a total of $23,000—sometimes through garnished wages and tax refunds—but could not repay her entire loan. Her balance was finally forgiven when she was 75.

Sandra Hinz returned to school in her 50s to become a medical assistant. But when her adult son became disabled in a motorcycle accident, she needed to be his full-time caregiver. She struggled to get help with her $28,000 loan despite income-driven repayment plans designed to help people like her.

As a young mother, Kendra Brooks attended community college for seven years, then followed up with a four-year degree and an MBA at age 50. She borrowed $50,000 over the years to pursue economic security for her family. Now a Philadelphia council member, Brooks says her personal experience—and that of her constituents—is that college never quite pays off.

I have met many people with similar stories. Student loans are a double-edged sword. Many borrowers do graduate and go on to successful careers. Economists say that, at least at current tuition levels, loans increase graduation rates and pay off in the long run. Berman never grapples with the question of whether, in some circumstances, loans might be a reasonable way to pay tuition bills.

But the numbers also say that it is not rare for borrowers to be worse off than if they had never gone to college. Before the student loan pause during the pandemic, a million students defaulted on their loans every year. One in three borrowers never graduates. Typical Black borrowers owe nearly as much as they borrowed even 10 years later, having made no dent in the principal. The experiences Berman describes might not be universal, but they are far from isolated anecdotes. The stories and data suggest that something is seriously wrong with the student loan program.

As I was peering at my charts around 2010, the student loan debt problem was getting worse. The Great Recession triggered state budget cuts, increasing tuition and student borrowing. For-profit online universities boomed, leaving millions with unaffordable debt. Graduates struggled to find footing in a weak job market, making their loan payments even more burdensome.

Around the same time, a political movement was brewing in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan. The Occupy Wall Street activists called for free college, student loan debt cancellation, and broader economic reforms. From that ferment emerged the Debt Collective, a determined and idealistic group of borrower activists.

Berman describes how the Debt Collective spent years raising grassroots funds to buy and forgive defaulted loans. They organized borrowers cheated by their colleges to press for their legal rights. They recruited allies to push for change through the political process.

In 2020, one of their allies, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, then running for president, made debt cancellation mainstream with a campaign pledge to forgive up to $50,000 in debt for each borrower. It resonated. Soon, other presidential candidates rolled out similar proposals, as did teachers’ unions, civil rights groups, and a new cadre of borrower groups like the Student Borrower Protection Center.

When Joe Biden won the White House in 2020, the focus turned to executive action rather than legislation. In 2022, Biden canceled up to $20,000 in debt per eligible borrower. But only months later, the Supreme Court struck down the plan, finding it to be an executive overreach.

Biden advanced a second set of student loan reforms that received less attention but had a similar price tag, were intended to be permanent, and provided forgiveness to some borrowers. The Washington Monthly called the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) repayment plan a “revolutionary” solution for borrowers with low incomes and large debts. The administration also broke down the bureaucratic obstacles within existing loan forgiveness programs—for public servants and borrowers with disabilities, among others—from discharging the entire loans of 5 million borrowers, including several people Berman profiles. But the Trump administration repealed the income-driven SAVE plan as part of its tax cut and laid off entire teams that help borrowers receive benefits.

So where do student-loan borrowers go from here? Berman says we need a “philosophical shift to change our higher education system to one in which individuals take on less of a risk and taxpayers take on more.” She calls for fixes to the student loan program, “truly free” options at public colleges, and addressing broader economic issues that have made college—and therefore student loans—feel indispensable to young people.

Right now, Congress is going in the other direction. The Republican budget bill made loans more expensive for many borrowers, redirecting some $300 billion to help pay for tax cuts that accrue primarily to high earners and corporations. Republicans also plan to cut off loans for programs whose former students have low earnings. In principle, this is the right strategy—we should stop making loans, as we know borrowers will not be able to repay them—and a spirit similar to Biden’s college accountability rules.

But without replacing more loans with more scholarships, the Republican plan will only encourage higher-cost private student loans and push college further out of reach for low-income students and students of color. It will also whittle down the goals of college to students’ future earnings at the expense of upward mobility, public service, religion, the arts, and many other social goals. A better approach would replace loans with a combination of free college, scholarships, and student loan benefits, especially for students who did not receive the ordinary economic benefits of a college degree.

We can also make college a more reliable investment. Over the past decade, we have boosted the college graduation rate by eight percentage points, but it is still only 61 percent. Leading colleges have found ways to help many students graduate and then connect their degrees to promising careers, using data and fostering advising and counseling. But we have not yet invested in making those steps the norm, particularly at the community colleges and regional public universities that serve most students.

Readers wondering how debt relief became a top-tier political issue should confront the stories in Sunk Cost. The book tells the same tale as that chart I saw more than a decade ago: For a sizable share of borrowers, the system is not working. A new approach to college finance, with substantial new investments, is needed to finally take advantage of higher education’s potential to build stronger lives and a stronger society.

The post Student Loan Debt: What Went Wrong and How to Fix It appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For the past two decades, the Washington Monthly has included in its annual college rankings measures of a university’s research prowess—its record of producing the new scholarship and scholars that drive economic growth and human flourishing. This year, we’ve put those metrics into a separate ranking, the Best Colleges for Research, which appear at the end of this article. It is the only such ranking published by a journalistic outlet—and a necessary one, given the Trump administration’s unprecedented attacks on university research.

There are other reasons why we created this new research ranking. This spring, the organization that categorizes colleges, the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, rewrote its definitions of what constitutes different types of institutions, including major research universities. We also decided this year to compare research universities to other types of institutions, like small liberal arts colleges that focus on teaching rather than research, to see which institutions are best at helping students succeed in their careers and engage as democratic citizens (see Best Colleges for Your Tuition (and Tax) Dollars). The only fair way to do that was to pull our research metrics into their own ranking. 

But most of all, at a time when the Trump administration is decimating funding for academic research, we wanted to illuminate the incredible benefits that America’s research universities provide to the country at large and to the states and regions where they’re located—and the unfathomable damage these cuts are likely to bring. 

Before we delve into the ranking, it’s important to understand how the United States built its world-class system of federally funded university-based research—a system that was neither inevitable nor, as we are now learning, invulnerable. In the early 20th century, Europe was the undisputed engine of scientific discovery. Aspiring top scientists didn’t dream of going to Harvard or Stanford. They went to Göttingen, where Max Born and Werner Heisenberg were pioneering quantum mechanics; to the Sorbonne, where Marie Curie revolutionized chemistry and medicine; or to Cambridge, where Ernest Rutherford and Paul Dirac rewrote the laws of atomic theory. A young New York–born physicist named J. Robert Oppenheimer followed that path—studying at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory before earning his doctorate under Born in 1927. At the time, American universities were respected teaching institutions. But they stood on the periphery of the global scientific frontier.

That changed abruptly when the United States made scientific supremacy a national strategy during World War II. In 1939, Oppenheimer was lecturing at chalkboards at UC Berkeley. Just four years later, as part of the Manhattan Project, the University of California was contracted by the federal government to operate the Los Alamos Laboratory, with Oppenheimer leading thousands of scientists in one of the most ambitious research efforts ever under-taken. It wasn’t just the birth of the atomic bomb. It was also the birth of the modern American research university—powered by a new kind of partnership between public investment and university-led inquiry. For more than 80 years, that system has fueled nearly every major scientific and technological breakthrough of the modern era.

That success was the result of deliberate postwar planning—shaped in large part by Vannevar Bush, the former MIT engineering dean who oversaw wartime science policy. In 1945, Bush submitted a report to President Harry Truman titled Science, the Endless Frontier, which called for sustained federal funding of universities to conduct research both for specific goals—to combat disease, ensure national security, and raise living standards—but also to advance scientific knowledge for its own sake. “Basic research is the pacemaker of technological progress,” he wrote. 

The system was designed to be decentralized, competitive, and entrepreneurial. Unlike European countries, in which most universities are operated at national or regional levels, the United States has a geographically dispersed array of state-owned and private nonprofit colleges and universities. Different federal agencies—the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the National Institutes of Health, and so on—set the broad parameters for grants based on their own agency’s goals. But scholars anywhere in the country could propose specific research projects, and decisions on which would get funding were made not by federal officials but by peer review panels of scholars, also from around the country. The system incentivized states to invest their own tax dollars in their public universities by recruiting top scholars who could win federal research grants and top graduate students who could work on those grants. It was, in short, an American-style, market-based solution to the task of building scientific capacity. 

The scale of this transformation is hard to overstate. Before World War II, federal spending accounted for just 20 percent of all U.S. research and development. By the 1960s, it made up two-thirds. Federal support for university research rose from under $70 million in 1940 (about 1 percent of today’s levels, adjusted for inflation) to more than $20 billion by 2000. By then, American university labs had given the world the polio vaccine, the internet, satellite navigation, the MRI, and much more.

As of 2023, U.S. universities spent over $108 billion on research and development—more than half of it funded by the federal government. That spending underpins not just scientific progress but entire regional economies. It trains the STEM workforce, fuels innovation, and creates good jobs far from the coasts. According to economists across the political spectrum, university-based R&D delivers one of the highest returns on investment of any federal expenditure. It produces breakthroughs, but also pipelines: of talent, of human capital, and of opportunity.

The Best Colleges for Research ranking is like an MRI of that system. It rates 139 institutions that each spend at least $100 million annually on research based on four equally weighted indicators: total research spending, science and engineering PhDs awarded, faculty receiving major national awards, and the share of faculty elected to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 

But a word of warning: This MRI was taken when the patient was at peak health. All the underlying data is from before January of this year, when Donald Trump was inaugurated. Since then, the NDF has frozen or canceled more than 1,700 grants, many of them focused on recruiting more women and racial minorities into STEM fields. The NIH faces proposed cuts of up to 40 percent for the fiscal year 2026 budget—jeopardizing over $10 billion in funding. The Trump administration effectively dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, canceling the billions in grants it once dispensed. The Departments of Energy and Defense have shifted green energy and climate funds elsewhere. And the Department of Education has opened more than 60 campus investigations and frozen billions in grants to universities. Trump officials have also proposed slashing university overhead reimbursements from 50-60 percent to 15 percent—effectively making much research unsupportable. 

The first thing you’ll notice when looking at the ranking is that the three universities at the top of the list—Stanford, MIT, Harvard—are precisely the kind you would target if you were Donald Trump and your aim was to punish elites in blue states. Another prestigious university, fifth-ranked Johns Hopkins, in deep blue Maryland, receives more federal research dollars than any university in the country. Those grant funds allow the institution to support more than 30,000 jobs in Baltimore and run the Applied Physics Laboratory, a critical player in U.S. missile defense and cybersecurity. But since Trump took office for the second time, Johns Hopkins has lost over $800 million in global health research—most of it when DOGE pulled the plug on USAID. The fallout: 600 clinical trials disrupted and vaccine development halted midstream. Consider those libs owned.

The second thing you’ll notice is that it’s not just elite private universities in blue coastal cities that rank highly on the list—and stand to lose big from Trump’s defunding of research universities. Like much of Trump’s second-term agenda, the cuts end up punishing the very people and places he claims to champion.

Five of the top 20 universities (including the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the University of Michigan) as well as two dozen more on the list are in swing states that Trump barely won in 2024 and that will likely determine who wins the presidency in 2028. Nearly 50 other institutions that make up the Best Colleges for Research ranking are in red states, including Texas A&M (number 16), the University of Florida (27), and Purdue University in Indiana (29).

These universities are not just major recipients of federal research dollars. As our ranking shows, many of them outperform Ivy League schools in awarding the STEM PhDs that keep the economy humming and America competitive in the world. (See chart). 

These institutions, most of them public, train the bulk of the engineers who build America’s infrastructure, the chemists who power our labs, and the computer scientists who staff defense contractors and clean energy start-ups. They, too, are facing devastating cuts. Between February and March, DOGE slashed more than $74 million in federal research grants going to 19 colleges and universities in Georgia, including the notoriously woke Georgia Institute of Technology (note to Georgia Tech grads: that’s a joke!). Case Western paused hiring and travel to brace for a projected $39 million loss. Louisiana State University imposed a campus-wide hiring freeze and withheld 2 percent of all department budgets as a buffer. Penn State lost $10 million in grants—halting projects on HIV prevention, cervical cancer vaccines, and diagnostics for newborns. Administrators now advise faculty to strip keywords like diversity and climate from proposals to avoid triggering more cancellations.

A third pattern you might notice is that many of the universities at the top of our ranking are in a handful of the fastest-growing states—California, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Florida. That’s no coincidence. Remember that the system Vannevar Bush devised created incentives for states to invest in their public university systems. Not all states, however, acted on those incentives with the same intensity and focus. Those that made long-term bets on higher education, built centralized public university management systems, and kept in-state tuition low tended also to garner more federal research dollars and the corresponding economic growth. (See Christopher M. Mullin, “Florida’s Fresh-Squeezed Colleges.”) 

Other, smaller states never made that bet on a similar scale and simply do not have as many options. In places like Montana and Nebraska, the local land grant is often the only serious research institution. As Joseph Parilla, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, put it, “For a lot of places, [research] is the last remaining economic and innovation engine that gives them relevance in a modern, technology-driven economy.” In other words, federal research funding isn’t just science policy—it’s regional development policy. When it dries up, entire communities, not just institutions, suffer the consequences.

Our ranking reflects a system still running at high capacity. But the damage is already visible, and not just at Ivy League schools. Job offers to new PhDs are being rescinded. Labs are consolidating. Faculty are leaving. 

In Mississippi, a state Trump won by over 22 points, the mayor of Starkville is sounding the alarm. “Every time you touch the university, you, in effect, touch Starkville,” Mayor Lynn Spruill told The New York Times, after Mississippi State lost funding for a USAID aquaculture project. The school, which spent more than $150 million in federal research money last year, is now bracing for deeper cuts to engineering and agriculture programs—key anchors of the local economy.

And as our ranking shows, the consequences won’t be limited to blue states. The very regions Trump claims to fight for—rural America, red America—may be the ones hit hardest. What took 80 years to build won’t take 80 years to unravel. But it may take that long to build again.

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In the near future, a collegiate crisis is looming. Beyond the federal government’s ongoing assault on higher education, with its politicized investigations and threats to funding, an inevitable and devastating cliff awaits. We’re talking, of course, about enrollment.

As the abnormally large Millennial generation gives way to the smaller Gen Z, American colleges are losing their ability to fill seats—and balance their budgets. Between 2010 and 2021, universities lost 15 percent of their student population, or about 2.7 million people. Hundreds of schools closed. As if that weren’t enough, demographers predict that those numbers will soon plummet again, decreasing by as much as another 15 percent by 2039. Losing close to a third of their student population in total will likely mean lights out for many more schools.

There is hope, however. Even as the general population shrank, Hispanic students made up 80 percent of increases in degree attainment between 2017 and 2022. Numbers of Hispanic high school graduates are projected to increase by 16 percent by 2041. Given the existential importance of serving this population, one might think that colleges would be ferociously competing to recruit these students and get them through school, and that major education publications would be closely tracking their progress. But there are few such measures of excellence out there, and the rankings of Hispanic-serving schools that do exist mostly rely on generalized data, rather than numbers that tell you specifically how Hispanic students are doing. And that’s why this year the Washington Monthly, in collaboration with the non-profit Excelencia in Education, is releasing a comparison of how schools serve this all-important population.

The Best Colleges for Hispanic Students ranking combines the social mobility focus of the Monthly’s college rankings with the deep knowledge that Excelencia has built over decades of studying Hispanic performance in higher education. Among many other metrics, the D.C.-based non-profit gathers data on the transfer and graduation rates of Hispanic students, which are a good approximation of how well schools serve them. The hundreds of schools that apply for the organization’s “Seal of Excelencia” certification provide that information for consideration—and much more. They also submit data about diversity among faculty and staff, along with other metrics, and descriptions of their programming, communications, and long-range planning around Hispanic education. To reflect those nuanced evaluations, we tracked in our ranking whether or not a school was awarded the seal. To those metrics we added two social mobility measures from our own rankings: net price (the annual amount students pay when factoring in aid), and the percentage of students who receive Pell Grants. 

We limited our ranking to federally recognized Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs) that provided this information when they applied for the Seal of Excelencia—151 schools, out of the 615 HSIs. As a result, we’re calling this the “Best” Colleges for Hispanic Students, not “Best and Worst.” Any school that serves so many Hispanic students (the minimum for an HSI is 25 percent) and that cares enough about its performance to go through the rigorous seal application is deserving of praise.

Many of the top performers, like UT–Rio Grande Valley (number two among four-year schools) and Fresno State (number eight), are favorites in the Monthly’s overall rankings (see Best Colleges for Your Tuition (and Tax) Dollars rankings). That’s no accident—those schools are already focused on delivering a quality education at low cost to underprivileged student populations. Take our number one university for Hispanic students, Cal State–Los Angeles. The regional university in East L.A. is a powerful engine of social mobility, with a low net price of $4,551 (fourth of the 1,421 schools in our overall rankings) and a high proportion of students on Pell Grants—66 percent. The school is more than three-quarters Hispanic, and it serves those students well: They graduate at close to the same rate as the general population (51 percent versus 53 percent, compared to the 13-point national gap). Cal State–LA also received the Seal of Excelencia in 2023, one of only nine institutions that year. 

Patterns emerge in the rankings, especially around location. A high proportion of Hispanic college students are in California, Texas, and New York. Those states dominate the top slots here, and if the list were expanded to include the bottom two-thirds of HSIs, you might expect to see them there, too. But demographic happenstance also gives rise to intentional excellence. Eight of the top 20 schools are California State campuses, which are united by their low prices, favorable graduation rates, and high numbers of non-wealthy students. The University of Texas and Texas A&M systems also do well. Texas A&M International is in third place, with an incredibly low price of $3,833 and a graduation rate for Hispanic students equal to that of the general population. Five other Texas schools occupy the top 20, including little-known Sul Ross State University (nine), a Seal of Excelencia winner that graduates Hispanic students at a better rate than it does the general population. The same is true of UT–San Antonio (13), which also boasts a seal, 42 percent Pell enrollment, and reasonably low costs. 

The rest of the country has plenty to offer, too. A few Florida schools, including Florida International University (18), reach the upper echelons. Like California and New York, much of the Florida state system’s excellence in our rankings is owed to a unified governance structure whose focus on affordability keeps tuition low. (See Christopher M. Mullin, “Florida’s Fresh-Squeezed Colleges.”) In Georgia, Dalton State College rises to 16th place mostly by virtue of its attractive cost—$5,083 a year. (The graduation rates, though not great, are about equal between Hispanic students and the general population of the college.) Two CUNY branches, Lehman and John Jay, make the top 20. Just a few miles apart and roughly the same size, they offer very low costs—around $4,000—to their roughly half-Hispanic student populations, and have virtually no ethnic graduation gap. John Jay proudly features a wide array of student support resources, including ¡Adelante!, a two-year leadership program that provides academic mentorship, career advice, and financial support to Hispanic students.

We also rank two-year schools in a separate list, because of a methodological wrinkle: Given how often students at these institutions finish their degrees at other schools, we count transfers as a positive rather than a negative. The number one  performer is South Texas College, a community college in the Rio Grande Valley with an overwhelmingly Hispanic student body—95 percent. Students pay a staggeringly low $1,414 a year, net of aid, and more than a third are on Pell Grants. In 2022, South Texas College celebrated its high performance in a ranking from Excelencia of schools that enroll and graduate Latinos. “Being an HSI is more than just a designation for STC, it’s our identity; it’s who we are,” Matthew Hebbard, vice president of student affairs and enrollment management, said in a statement. The school focuses heavily on student support services for its many first-generation and ESL students, as well as on hands-on vocational training, including at partner universities in Mexico that prepare students for manufacturing jobs. 

These schools offer many concrete lessons about the kinds of programs that best serve Hispanic students. Crucially, they aren’t limited to one part of college. Our number two four-year school, UT–Rio Grande Valley, boasts a comprehensive strategy that includes “Tuition Advantage,” a program that pays tuition and fees for students with family incomes under $125,000; a dual credit program with several area high schools; and a robust international student services department for its Latin American undergraduates. One of Excelencia in Education’s regular awards is the “Examples of Excelencia,” four programs chosen from dozens around the country as a model for what works. They include a wide range of programs, from student support services to language instruction to academic skills classes to scholarships and recruiting initiatives meant to boost access to college.

There are many places to find great ideas, including at schools that aren’t on this list. In 2024, one of the finalists for the Examples of Excelencia award was a student support service at Santa Barbara City College called the Writing Center, which works with high numbers of Hispanic students. Just creating a student service center focused on writing support isn’t the innovation; what’s special about the Writing Center, Emma Trelles, the poet and former professor who directs the center, told me, is the staff’s understanding of how cultural and linguistic understanding affects success. “As the daughter of immigrants and the first in my family to complete college and go on to get a master’s, I know firsthand how hard it is to navigate bureaucracies and complete platforms and all the things you have to do as a student when you don’t have guidance,” she told me. The center’s handpicked tutors, about a third of whom are bilingual in English and Spanish, view themselves as “collaborators,” Trelles said, not teachers or lecturers. Some students come for just a few sessions—like a young man of Mexican descent who recently asked Trelles for help navigating the college online dashboard. Others come back again and again, brushing up on their writing, polishing their English, and sometimes just talking through their daily problems and fears. In applying for the Examples of Excelencia award, the Writing Center tracked down statistics on its own effectiveness. From 2017 to 2023, Hispanic students who visited the center between one and three times completed their classes at rates 13 to 25 percent higher than those who didn’t visit at all. 

Completion, and enrollment—colleges will need to improve their performance in these areas over the coming decade if they wish to survive. And to do so, they will need to serve an expanding and often under-privileged student population that itself is a focus of many of today’s political attacks. (On his first day in office, Donald Trump rescinded Biden-era initiatives to support HSIs as part of a slew of executive orders against what he called “harmful” DEI.) By highlighting the schools that have recognized and accepted that mantle, we hope to inspire others to follow. Maybe then that cliff will not seem so steep.

Best Hispanic-Serving Colleges (4yr and 2yr)

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