The past year has been one of unceasing turmoil in higher education, with assaults on the fundamental social and economic value of college. Student protesters at Columbia, Harvard, Penn, and other universities received fervent denouncements and praise. The presidents of several of those institutions were called before Congress and two were forced by their boards to resign. Federal courts blocked another Biden administration loan forgiveness plan. Red states defunded diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and put restrictions on the teaching of America’s racial history. Capping all of that were revelations about Project 2025, the conservative road map for a second Trump term, which contains such radical policy prescriptions as closing down the federal Department of Education and privatizing all student loans. A heightened and troubling level of rancor pervades these plans and the wider political conversation about higher education. But the focus of both sides’ attention remains the same.

Time and again, conservatives whip themselves into a fury over phenomena, real or imagined, that predominantly take place in top-ranked universities. The same goes for the so-called liberal elite, whose members think about college primarily through the lens of their venerated alma maters. Consider, for instance, the bitter though legitimate debate over the value of the Gaza war protests that drove the news for months. What’s not debatable, as the Washington Monthly showed with hard numbers in June, is that the protests were largely absent from the open-access schools that most American college students attend. Yet that fact went almost completely unmentioned in media reports and congressional hearings, leaving the impression that the whole of higher education was involved in controversies that were chiefly confined to highly selective universities.

This joint obsession with elite schools is warping our politics by aggravating the large and growing political divide between those with a college education and those without. It is not an exaggeration to say that this divide, which is both a symbol and a cause of broader economic and cultural rifts in society, could determine which party wins control of the federal government in November.

We couldn’t have known that higher education would become such a central political issue when we published the first Washington Monthly college rankings in 2005. We were quite sure, however, that the national fixation on a handful of highly selective universities, fed by U.S. News & World Report’s college ranking system, was a crisis in the making. Apex colleges have their place—as training grounds for future leaders, producers of cutting-edge scholarship, and so forth. But the values that define them—how world renowned they are, how much money they raise and spend, how many students they don’t let in—are the opposite of those that should guide the broader system of higher education, where the aim is to make quality college degrees available and affordable to as many people in as many local communities as possible.

We wanted to challenge elite schools to be less self-serving and to elevate in the national conversation the hundreds of humbler colleges and universities that are the backbone of the American higher ed system. These institutions, especially the state-run “regional” universities that are the theme of this year’s college guide, do the noble work of helping low- and middle-income students get the education they need to get ahead in life. These schools also tend to be enmeshed in, and beloved by, their local communities as centers of economic growth and civic life. Yet they are largely unknown outside of their regions.

So, we devised an alternative set of benchmarks for what “excellence” is in higher education, ones that measure what colleges do for their country, instead of for themselves. Rather than reward institutions for their wealth, fame, and exclusivity, we evaluate them on their commitment to three goals: social mobility, research, and public service. We give credit to colleges that welcome students from low- and middle-income backgrounds and get them through college and into good jobs with manageable debt. We use reliable data on research spending and PhD attainment for graduates, rather than the imprecise reputational surveys that other rankings rely on. And we track how colleges encourage their students to be active citizens by voting; serving in the military, Peace Corps, and AmeriCorps; and majoring in socially valuable fields like teaching, health care, and social work. As a result, our rankings highlight the parts of America’s higher education system that the Ivy-focused headlines of the past year, and so many before, have ignored.

The good news is that elite private universities have been feeling the pressure to recruit more students of modest means—and with their endowments exploding in size, they’ve had more than enough resources to cover those students’ costs. As a result, some big-name institutions did well on our rankings this year. Six of the top 11 national universities are Ivies, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford snagged the top two spots. That’s not far from where they landed on U.S. News’s rankings, which also now have a social mobility metric. But that metric makes up such a modest portion of the overall U.S. News score that private colleges that treat lower-income students abysmally also do well. Tulane, Baylor, and Hofstra rank 73rd, 93rd, and 185th on U.S. News’s list of national universities. They come in 429th, 363rd, and 422nd on ours. Not only do they recruit few low-income students and charge them a fortune, but they also produce little scholarly research and fail to prepare their students to engage in their democracy.

On our liberal arts college rankings, Berea College and Harvey Mudd College are again at the top, though they have very different profiles. Kentucky-based Berea is a supercharged engine of social mobility, with excellent earnings, graduation rate, net price, and academic performance for low-income students. Los Angeles–area Harvey Mudd doesn’t bring in nearly as many Pell recipients, but it has excellent research chops and its graduates go on to earn very good money (an average of $123,761 nine years after matriculating) and an unparalleled number of advanced degrees. On the other hand, tony Oberlin College, 51st on the U.S. News liberal arts college list, is down at number 108 on ours. It costs $16,357 a year (making it 87th in net price), brings in only a handful of low-income students, and does a mediocre job of supporting them. Zero—zero—graduates this past year pursued service-oriented majors, and very few entered government service. Oberlin also received no points on our scale of schools’ efforts to get students to vote.

Even if they try, selective private universities and liberal arts colleges can’t help many low-income students get ahead for the simple reason that they educate only 6 percent of all undergraduates. Flagship public universities have more capacity, enrolling 19 percent of all bachelor’s students, and some of them rank near the top of our list this year—kudos to the University of Wisconsin–Madison (12), the University of California, Berkeley (13), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (19). Unfortunately, many other flagship public universities, like the University of Colorado Boulder (109) and the University of Vermont (203), have become more like private universities—exclusive, expensive, and solicitous of wealthy out-of-state and foreign students rather than nonaffluent residents in their own states.

To find the real engines of upward mobility, you need to look lower on the traditional pecking order, to what are called regional public universities. These institutions often have “state” in their name, admit most or all applicants, and are generally not much known nationally. Yet they bestow more than 40 percent of all four-year degrees in America. U.S. News lists only three regional publics among its top 100 national universities. Sixteen make it into the Washington Monthly top 100, including California State University, Fresno (22), Florida Atlantic University (41), and Montclair State (57).

Regional publics also dominate the upper reaches of our bachelor’s and master’s lists. In the former category, fourth-ranked Elizabeth City State, a historically Black university in North Carolina, is number one in offering students a low net price, number six in ROTC participation, and number nine in research expenditures. SUNY Geneseo is the top master’s school for its formidable research and its number one performance in sending grads on to earn PhDs. Meanwhile, the many campuses of the for-profit DeVry University continue to disappoint. The branch in Ontario, California, is ranked 587th among our master’s schools because it charges students $30,000 a year, graduates an abysmal 26 percent of them in eight years, underperforms expected earnings by 25 percent, and sends practically no one on to PhDs.

Regional universities are the real workhorses of higher education. They serve exactly the kind of people that politicians in both parties—but especially Republicans, these days—profess to advocate for: working-class students in search of a practical education that will prepare them for the workforce and a step up the socioeconomic ladder. We’ve long been fans of these unassuming institutions, which have launched the careers of such prominent Americans as Tom Hanks and Tim Walz. Indeed, their virtues and struggles are the thread that runs through all the feature articles in this issue of the magazine.

For one, the teaching is better at regional public universities than at elite institutions, writes Jonathan Zimmerman. That’s because faculty at elite universities get ahead by pursuing research rather than good classroom pedagogy. That said, teaching quality throughout higher education is generally poor and has been for generations—a sorry situation that won’t change, Zimmerman argues, until the federal government puts its muscle and money behind reform.

Regional universities also provide states with an exceptional return on state taxpayer dollars, Zach Marcus reports. Whereas graduates of flagships often leave for jobs in distant cities, those of regional universities typically settle down and build their careers in-state. Yet the regionals typically receive far less public funding than flagships, which wield more political power. And conservative state lawmakers, channeling the outrage over campus “wokeness” their constituents pick up on Fox News, demand cuts to higher ed budgets that hit hardest the regional universities that most benefit their constituents’ kids. 

Because they are seen as lower status, regional universities sometimes try to ape flagships by tightening their admissions standards and devoting more money to research—actions that help them rise in the U.S. News rankings. They almost never lower their institution’s selectivity to serve more students and pour money into programs that meet local needs rather than burnish their national reputations. But that’s exactly what José Luis Cruz Rivera has done at Northern Arizona University. As Jamal Watson writes, Cruz’s early success is turning heads in the higher ed reform world.

Regional universities also offer some of the best returns for the millions of Americans looking to upgrade their careers by going to graduate school. That’s a key finding of a new ranking we are unveiling in this issue, “America’s Best and Worst Master’s Programs.” The other key finding is that the worst returns are offered at some of the country’s most prestigious universities. A master’s degree in nursing from Yale, for instance, will leave you $118,849 in debt, on average, whereas you’ll borrow only $23,302 for the same degree from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley while earning slightly more five years later ($133,871 versus $128,563 for Yalies). Information like this can’t be found on U.S. News’s popular “Best Graduate Schools” guide, because that ranking mostly ignores how much programs cost or how much debt students tend to graduate with. If you want to understand how these elite universities get away with it, read Marc Novicoff’s investigation of the master’s in counseling program at Northwestern University. (Spoiler: It’s because the federal government lets them.)

Another first-of-its-kind ranking we are debuting in this issue, “America’s Best and Worst Colleges for Women in STEM,” tells quite a different story. Elite private universities like Carnegie Mellon and flagships like the University of Washington are the ones doing the best job of reversing women’s underrepresentation in science and technology degrees, while regional public universities are among the biggest laggards. But as Laura Colarusso notes, the high rate of women succeeding in STEM at elite universities takes away the reason other colleges often trot out for their failure: that women aren’t interested or can’t compete with men in these endeavors. If regional universities stop making excuses and up their game, their sheer size means that America could have considerably more female scientists and engineers to meet the economy’s growing demand for such talent.

And finally, Anne Kim reports on another way to improve outcomes for masses of students at unheralded schools: Reform the developmental education classes that so many freshmen get thrown into. Remedial education has long been a kind of limbo for underprivileged or underperforming students; it’s expensive, time consuming, and simply doesn’t work to get the vast majority of students back on track. Proven reform methods do exist, like “corequisite” classes that meet alongside, not in place of, college-level courses. But a decade-old push to put those fixes in place has stalled, Kim writes, and Washington needs to provide an extra push to overcome faculty skepticism and institutional inertia.

There’s clearly room for regional universities to improve their performance, but it would help if we didn’t starve them of funds. On average, regional publics receive about 10 percent fewer state dollars per student than do flagships. They also garner less federal research funding. And they don’t have the kind of gargantuan endowments that elite schools enjoy, because they are in the business of educating average Americans, not people who go into hedge funds and investment banks. If we supported regional universities at anything like the level of elite colleges, there would be considerably more of the former and fewer of the latter in the top 100 of our rankings.

Both sides of the aisle are guilty of ignoring the contributions of regional universities. But they do so for different reasons: liberals, out of ignorance or snobbery; conservatives, because it undermines the populist anti–higher ed agenda. After all, what are regional publics but a huge government-funded program, one that keeps flyover towns afloat while improving millions of working-class Americans’ lives?

Still, it’s possible to break through these sorts of partisan blinders. A few years ago, community colleges and vocational training weren’t high on the national agenda, either. Today, elected officials in both parties talk about them constantly, and at least pretend to want to invest in them. A similar boost in recognition for regional public universities could bring benefits beyond what can be measured in degrees attained and jobs acquired. Voters these days hold almost all institutions in low regard; it’s part of what drives the nihilism of our politics. But all Americans, regardless of party, ought to be proud of what regional universities do every day. Elevating them in the national conversation could go a long way toward bringing us together.

Special thanks to the Lumina Foundation for its support of the college guide and rankings issue and to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Strada Educational Foundation for their support of our general higher education coverage.

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

In high school, Jenna Duursma sometimes dreamed of leaving home. Growing up in rural Allegan, Michigan, a town she half-jokingly described as “just a bunch of cornfields,” she felt antsy. “To put it bluntly, I wanted to get the hell out of Michigan,” Jenna explained. 

But while she toyed with the idea of going to a school like the University of Alabama, paying out-of-state tuition was always out of the question. 

Instead, she opted for Grand Valley State University. The regional public institution had a sterling reputation and affordable tuition, and was only an hour drive away from her hometown. “I’m an only child, and my parents were a little bit older, and so that’s kind of the reason why I chose to stay around.” She quickly fell in love with GVSU and with living closer to the bustling city of Grand Rapids. “Getting to know people from different parts of Michigan has opened my eyes to what we have here,” Jenna told me, beaming. “I could see myself living [in Grand Rapids] for a while.” She graduated in April with a double major in finance and marketing and now has a job at Acrisure, a Grand Rapids–based financial technology and insurance company where she interned during her senior year. 

Jenna’s journey helps illuminate a pressing issue in higher education today. Colleges and universities are under enormous pressure, from demographically driven admissions declines to accusations of “wokeness” to mounting public doubts about the value of a four-year degree. Public universities like GVSU took big hits to their budgets after the Great Recession, and while overall per student funding has returned to pre-recession levels in most of the country, debates continue over whether higher education is a sound investment. Many Republican state lawmakers, especially those representing rural areas, argue that public universities contribute to “brain drain,” when students earn college degrees on the taxpayer’s dime and then move out of state to pursue their careers. Those dollars would be better spent, they say, by cutting taxes and subsidizing companies to relocate to their states. 

Are they right? The Upjohn Institute, a nonpartisan research organization focused on policy-related issues of employment, set out to answer that question. Using innovative research methods, a group of scholars led by the Upjohn senior economist Brad J. Hershbein found that students at brand-name public flagships—places like the University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin–Madison, University of Kansas, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to name a few—do tend to leave those states after graduation. But alumni of less-renowned regional public universities, like GVSU, generally stick around, as Jenna Duursma has. And the higher salaries they earn thanks to their degrees provide a significant net plus to the economies of those states and regions.

In the battle for funding, however, regional universities typically lose out. On average, they receive $1,091 (or about 10 percent) less state funding per student than do flagships, according to the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges, and the funding gap is even worse in Michigan. Regional schools also garner fewer federal research dollars and have smaller endowments. At the same time, regional public universities grant more than 40 percent of all four-year degrees in America, versus 19 percent awarded by public flagships. The average family income of students whose first-choice institution is a regional public school is approximately 24 percent less than for those whose first choice is a public flagship—a factor that helps explain why nearly 60 percent of African American students and 44 percent of Latino students are educated by regional publics. In other words, the universities that disproportionately serve low- and middle-income families, produce the most college graduates of any sector, and return the greatest economic benefits for their home states are the same institutions that have been systemically starved of funding. Nearly every state finds itself in this dilemma. How Michigan has dealt with it provides lessons for the rest of the country. 

In 2010, Republican Rick Snyder, a conservative businessman, ran for governor of Michigan promising to end a decade-long decline in state support of higher education. But after winning the election, and with GOP control of the state legislature, he slashed funding a further 15 percent, reducing state support to its lowest level this century. A University of Michigan alum, Snyder claimed that these cuts were necessary to finance a gargantuan $1.6 billion corporate tax cut, which he championed as the policy that will “make us a great state again.” 

Cuts to state higher education budgets are typically accompanied by an implicit understanding that universities will react by shifting the cost onto students. Andy Schor, the current mayor of Lansing and former state representative, explained the mind-set some legislators adopt when determining funding priorities: “When you look at higher education, they have the ability to charge tuition. So they have the ability to raise dollars, as opposed to K–12, as opposed to health care.” Left unsaid are the predictably pernicious consequences that accompany higher education’s disinvestment. In the decade following Snyder’s cuts, tuition rose 15 percent faster than inflation at Michigan public universities year over year and student debt increased by more than $7,000. Forty-five thousand fewer people attended college in 2022 than in 2011. 

Regional universities were hit hardest by the funding cuts. While the University of Michigan could easily recruit more wealthy, foreign, and out-of-state students to mitigate funding shortfalls, regional universities had far less leeway. In-state students predominantly from low- or middle-income families compose most of their student bodies. As the university saw undergraduate enrollment rise 16 percent between 2010 and 2020, enrollment rates fell at 11 of the state’s 12 other four-year public universities. Regional schools like Eastern Michigan University and Central Michigan University were hit particularly hard, losing 31 percent and 39 percent of their enrollments, respectively. 

Grand Valley State University was in a particularly challenging spot, largely due to its previous success. When the school was founded in 1963, its first-year class consisted of only 224 students. In a decade that figure grew to 6,000; at the time of the cuts, the student body was north of 24,000 students. But due to Michigan’s anachronistic funding formula, which was developed in the 1970s and only minimally updated, the legislature doesn’t take enrollment growth into account when determining state appropriations. Schools that attract more students each year are punished with less per student funding. The result was that GVSU, already significantly underfunded before Snyder’s 2011 budget, was cut to the bone. Matt McLogan, GVSU’s vice president for university relations, said after the budget was passed, “Grand Valley has essentially been privatized. It’s publicly owned, but is no longer publicly supported in any way that people would recognize.” To stave off more significant tuition hikes after Snyder’s cuts, GVSU was forced to freeze faculty salaries, the president’s included. 

I tried to uncover why the state continued to use a funding formula that almost nobody thought was a good idea. Robert Genetski, a former schoolteacher and Michigan state representative, provided one explanation: political clout. Larger universities have more money to employ highly paid lobbyists to influence state appropriations. For example, in 2011—the year that the legislators considered the 2012 budget—the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and Central Michigan University together outspent every other school combined on lobbying in Lansing. These lobbyists can have quite an impact. Genetski explained to me that while the original higher education budget for the following year, 2013, contained the largest increases in state support for high-performing regional universities like GVSU and Ferris State University, lobbyists for more influential universities successfully killed his budget. Instead, the legislature boosted overall higher education spending by a bit, but with the largest research universities receiving the overwhelming majority of the new money. Over the next few years, Snyder signed additional modest increases in higher education spending, but at levels below what they had been when he was first elected, and with the lion’s share going to the universities with the best political connections, not the highest performance. 

In 2018, Democrat Gretchen Whitmer—a veteran of Michigan’s legislature since 2001 and a fierce opponent of Snyder’s cuts—secured a 10-point gubernatorial victory, in part by promising to reinvest in higher education. While encountering constant Republican resistance, she gradually increased state appropriations. When Democrats retook control of the legislature in 2022, Whitmer was able to implement even more expansive reform. In the next year, state appropriations rose to a century high, 48 percent above their low point in 2011. Whitmer also created a generous achievement scholarship, which tripled state financial aid, and she secured free community college for all residents of Michigan. When I spoke with GVSU’s president, Philomena Mantella, about the differences between the legislative climate of today versus a decade ago, she concurred that the tides are changing. Although she pointed out that GVSU continues to operate at a structural disadvantage because of the state’s funding formula, she also agreed that the discourse around higher education had changed. “In 2010, there were lots of questions about college investment as a driver for economic prosperity,” she said. “I don’t hear that anymore.” Directly challenging the conservative consensus, Whitmer bet that investing in higher education would yield greater economic benefits than corporate tax relief. 

The new Upjohn Institute paper validates her belief. The conservative charge that states don’t benefit from subsidizing higher education since so many of its graduates end up moving to Brooklyn or San Francisco has been hard to assess because of a lack of reliable data. The Upjohn study addressed this problem by “scraping” publicly available information on the networking platform Linked-In to identify where college graduates end up residing. They then calculated how much state funding each university received, factoring in retention, graduation, and dropout rates for every university. This resulted in a more precise measurement, which correctly gives credit to higher-performing universities. Using that data, the researchers constructed a “social return” metric, consisting of three components: the level of tax revenue spent per student, the graduation rate, and net migration. 

The results were unambiguous. On a basis of return on tax dollars, regional universities outperform flagships. For every $100,000 of state funding, the researchers found, regional universities retain nearly two college graduates in the state for every one flagships keep. “From the lens of a state policymaker,” they concluded, “we show that regional public institutions tend to produce the greatest number of graduates who stay and work in-state per dollar of state funding, suggesting investments in these institutions could have particularly high local returns.” (While the best community colleges have similarly high ROI, many others don’t because their students graduate at lower rates and earn less after college.)

In Michigan, the top nine best-performing universities are regional publics, with the two best-known schools, Michigan State and the University of Michigan, ranking 10th and 13th, according to the study’s underlying data, which the researchers shared with the Washington Monthly. Coming in at number one, by a considerable amount, is GVSU, retaining almost five college graduates per $100,000 of state funds—the sixth-highest rate of return of any college in the country. To put that into perspective, consider this: According to a separate Upjohn study, governments must spend nearly $200,000 in corporate tax incentives to create just one job—and not a college-level-salary job, just an average-paying job. That’s a rate of return 10 times worse than what Michigan taxpayers get for their investments in GVSU. 

Founded in the 1960s as “the university in a cornfield,” Grand Valley State University—like many regional universities—has chronically struggled to attract the requisite attention and funding from Lansing. Until 2017, GVSU received the least per student funding of any school in the state; today it garners the third least, $2,000 less per student than Michigan’s average public university. Under these conditions, most colleges would likely underperform their peers. And yet GVSU consistently ranks first or second in overall performance, according to state performance criteria that include a host of metrics, including graduation rates, retention rates, students who are eligible for Pell Grants, and degrees awarded in critical fields. GVSU also ranks a respectable 82nd out of 372 on the Washington Monthly’s Best Bang for the Buck list of colleges in the Midwest.

But perhaps most relevant for state legislators is the university’s return on tax dollars investment, which is almost unmatched anywhere in the country. The question is, why? 

One reason is graduation rates. Colleges with higher grad rates have more alumni earning higher incomes. GVSU graduates nearly 69 percent of its students. That’s better, by far, than any other regional university in the state. Only the University of Michigan and Michigan State have higher graduation rates among publics, but they are more selective than GVSU, which admits 90 percent of its applicants. 

Another reason is that colleges located in regions with robust economies have higher returns on state investment because their alumni tend to earn higher incomes. Grand Rapids is something of a boomtown: It has been called “the most successful intensive manufacturing city in America,” and GVSU makes the best of its geographic good fortune. For instance, 75 percent of the university’s students engage in internships, apprenticeships, and other forms of experiential learning. One such experience is the Laker Accelerated Talent Link, a program that Jenna Duursma joined during her senior year, which offers a $15,000 scholarship, a business-related certificate, and a paid internship. “The whole point of the program is to retain talent in the Grand Rapids community,” Duursma explained. “That was kind of the selling point for me because a lot of these companies I’ve grown up hearing about and been interested in my whole life.” 

Connecting students with the community also offers GVSU the ability to constantly test and update the curriculum. As students learn what skills and classes were most useful to them, faculty and administrators internalize that feedback to better tailor the university’s offerings. Curriculum adaptation also unfolds on a much larger scale. After a recent study concluded that Grand Rapids needed to increase the local tech talent tenfold, Mantella created the GVSU College of Computing, with a mandate to triple the number of tech graduates the school produces by 2033. 

All of this adds up to a college experience that offers students a particularly good opportunity to graduate and start their career nearby. In a 2023 survey of GVSU graduates, 93 percent of respondents were either employed or continuing education. Eighty-six percent of those graduates live and work in Michigan, 76 percent of them in western Michigan, where Grand Rapids is located. 

Of course, there is only so much that GVSU can accomplish with such limited funding. Even as the school offers an incredible return on investment for the state, rising tuition and student debt mean the students don’t get as good a deal. GVSU readily acknowledges this reality. When I spoke with Thomas Haas, the president of the university at the time of the 2011 cuts, he explained, “Each year I was president I would go to the state and tell them that if we received funding at the median level for universities in Michigan, I could cut tuition 15 percent. The board fully supported me on that. And the legislature just kind of laughed and said okay but never ended up doing anything about it.” 

With more funding, GVSU could not only lower tuition, or at least moderate future increases; it could also produce more of the graduates that Michigan desperately requires. Tech graduates could be tripled sooner than the 2033 target. The university could reinvest in its nursing program—an occupation Michigan is experiencing a dramatic shortage in. The Talent Link, which started with 21 students and Mantella hopes to double each year, could expand by orders of magnitude if the state helped subsidize it: “Suddenly, you’ve got 5,000 students who could be activated. From a state investment perspective, programs that have employers with skin in the game and institutions with skin in the game, that’s a leveraged dollar. To me it’s like, Let’s go.” 

Rick Snyder was fond of castigating college graduates who left the state to become “just another yuppie in Chicago.” But it was primarily his decision to decimate regional university funding, which fueled the exodus of fleeing talent. Since Gretchen Whitmer restored funding, GVSU has experienced its first positive enrollment growth in six years. And other schools are beginning to turn things around; Michigan universities statewide saw a 1.8 percent enrollment increase from 2023 to 2024.

Meanwhile, similar battles over higher education funding have only intensified in other states as public confidence in universities, especially among conservative voters, has sharply declined—a function of ideological distrust, anti-elitism, and exorbitant costs all rising in tandem. Legislators assiduously frame cuts as reactions to whichever college bugaboo becomes the latest culture war fodder, so higher education has become the perennial conservative bogeyman. Mississippi, for one, continues to follow the old Snyder playbook. After the State Auditor’s Office released a report detailing high levels of brain drain for college graduates, it proposed getting rid of what the auditor, Shad White, called “useless,” “garbage” liberal arts degrees, which he said serve as “indoctrination factories.” When similar reports of brain drain surfaced in Pennsylvania, conservative legislators quickly proposed creating a constitutional amendment to cap spending and cut taxes to retain talent. Instead, Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro managed to convince the legislature to invest an additional $190.8 million in Pennsylvania’s higher education system, mostly in scholarships to attend regional universities. This decision reverses decades of disinvestment that has left the Keystone State one of the least affordable states to attend college, ranking 49th in the country for state appropriations to higher education per capita. 

Now appears an especially promising time to invest in regional universities. When the pandemic laid bare the fragility of global supply chains, policy makers responded with a frenzy of federal legislation supporting infrastructure investment, industrial policy, and reshoring production back into America. Richard Florida, an urbanist who rose to prominence for his 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class, told me that more skilled workers will be necessary to make this strategy succeed. While research universities are critical for producing top-end talent, Florida explained, “the knowledge economy requires talent of all stripes. You not only need the kids in Ann Arbor doing all the coding, you also need people in Grand Valley who can make shit work.” 

Michigan learned this the hard way in 2017, when Amazon announced that it was looking for a city to be the new home of its secondary headquarters. The benefits would be immense: as many as 50,000 new full-time employees earning more than $100,000 a year in wages and benefits on average, generating $5 billion in economic activity. Few states offered incentive packages as generous as the ones Rick Snyder pushed through the legislature to lure the company to Detroit. All told, the 242-page proposal outlined roughly $4 billion in tax breaks. And yet Amazon passed on it. Detroit didn’t even crack the company’s final top 20 list. Why? Amazon’s calculation was incredibly simple: Michigan possessed an insufficient talent pool in the region.

As states scramble to compete for the top jobs and companies, tax incentives will always play some role. But politicians are fooling themselves if they think corporate subsidies can substitute for the steady support of regional universities, which, dollar for dollar, offer the best hope for broad prosperity in the 21st century
and beyond.

The post Those Colleges With “State” in Their Name  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

 Coconino Community College was founded in 1991 to serve the county around Flagstaff, Arizona, amid fears that, as a local paper editorialized back then, many people there “cannot afford to or are not allowed to enroll at Northern Arizona University,” the local state school. For 30 years since, the community college has embraced its obligation to those underserved people, many of them low-income minorities, in keeping with its motto: “Start Small, Go Big.” Each spring CCC has held commencement on its small campus in Flagstaff, where it celebrates the modest number of graduates who move on to four-year schools. That is, until this May, when Coconino students received their first-ever invite to hold graduation at the big university down the road.

On the sprawling grounds of Northern Arizona University, a steady roar of applause and cheers greeted the graduates as they marched across the stage of NAU’s 1,350-seat auditorium to “Pomp and Circumstance,” wearing black and gold regalia and broad smiles. In a chorus of testimonials that brought attendees to tears, students recounted the many challenges that could have easily derailed this special day. Sawyer Anna Allison-Begay spoke about how she had to make the daily 100-mile round-trip journey from her Navajo Nation reservation to the community college so she could become the first in her family to earn an associate’s degree. This fall, she will continue her studies at the University of Arizona. Many of her classmates, however, planned to finish their bachelor’s degrees at their host for the day, NAU—something that the larger school’s new president not only welcomes but openly celebrates. During the ceremony, José Luis Cruz Rivera told the graduating class of mostly low-income, first-generation Hispanic students that each of them had a place at NAU. 

“The milestone that together we celebrate here today is a powerful reminder that better days are sure to come,” he told the students, pausing to summon the audience to deliver a rousing applause for those CCC students who will transfer to NAU in the fall.

Hosting the community college’s graduation ceremony is an example of a broader—and highly unconventional—strategy Cruz Rivera has brought to Northern Arizona University since his arrival as the school’s 17th president in 2021. A former state teacher’s college that has grown over time into a well-regarded regional university, NAU provides a wide array of four-year and graduate degree programs to an economically and racially diverse population of mostly in-state students. But in the pecking order of status and public funds, the school sits behind the state’s flagship, the University of Arizona, and the burgeoning Arizona State. 

Normally, an ambitious college president coming to a place like NAU would seek to make the school “better” in certain prescribed ways. One is to admit a “better” class of students—that is, become more academically selective, which also brings students from wealthier families and hence more tuition dollars. Another is to become a nationally recognized research institution—the strategy Cruz Rivera’s predecessor followed. Such moves help colleges rise on the indexes that most determine prestige in the higher ed world—the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, which doles out coveted “R1” designations for universities that spend big money on research, and U.S. News & World Report’s annual college rankings. 

What striving college presidents almost never do is make their institutions less selective and pour funds into programs that meet local needs rather than burnish their national reputations. Yet that’s precisely what Cruz Rivera has done. Over the last three years he has loosened NAU’s admissions standards to accept almost anyone from Arizona who applies. He has implemented free tuition for students from families earning less than $65,000. He has ramped up outreach to community colleges, high schools in low-income and minority areas, and members of Indigenous tribes. He has created partnerships with Arizona employers so his students have a better chance of landing decent jobs when they graduate. And he has begun to build a new school of medicine to train physicians to work in underserved areas of the state. 

It is not, in short, a strategy designed to elevate NAU’s place on U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings—though it might just boost its position on the Washington Monthly’s. And that’s fine with Cruz Rivera. His ultimate aim at Northern Arizona University is to redefine what “better” means in higher education. On a Monday-afternoon stroll through campus this past May, Cruz Rivera’s eyes widened with excitement as he talked to me about NAU’s future. “We’re interested in postcollege outcomes for our students,” he added. “Are they getting good, high-paying jobs that will provide them with family-sustaining wages? Are they positioned for success in their careers? Are they getting into graduate schools that will allow them to meet their full potential?” 

Though Cruz Rivera’s strategy for NAU is unconventional, it is garnering praise from political leaders on both sides of the aisle in Arizona—and attention from organizations that matter in the world of higher education reform. That includes foundations, which have invested more than $50 million in NAU since Cruz Rivera’s arrival. Bill Gates, who was NAU’s 2023 commencement speaker, marveled that “something remarkable and all too rare is happening in Flagstaff.” 

Truth be told, Cruz Rivera wasn’t looking for a job when he received a call out of the blue in late 2020 asking if he might be interested in becoming NAU’s next president. The nation was then in the throes of a global pandemic, and the soft-spoken administrator seemed perfectly content as the executive vice chancellor and university provost of the City University of New York. Cruz Rivera was second in command of the largest urban university system in the nation, where he oversaw 25 campuses, a student population of about 500,000, and a broad portfolio that included academic affairs, student affairs, enrollment management, and research. To take a job at this regional university of about 30,000students might have looked like a step down for an academic who was at the apex of a long career that had included stints as president and provost at CUNY and Cal State schools.

“I thought this would be my last job,” he told me, matter-of-factly.

But Cruz Rivera saw the NAU opening as an exciting opportunity. At the beginning of his career, he rose through University of Puerto Rico schools to become chief student affairs officer for the entire system, before moving to the mainland. Now he had the chance to work for another Hispanic-serving institution—a federal designation that NAU received in 2021—but this time as president, with the power to transform the school. And as it happened, Cruz Rivera was brimming with ideas. He had just finished serving on the Post-secondary Value Commission, a nationwide panel of higher ed leaders and experts focused on making college a better return on investment, both for students and for society. “Postsecondary value” is a bit of higher ed jargon that refers to the ways to measure the returns colleges and universities provide for the money we put into them. Those could be economic payoffs, like producing graduates who can support themselves with productive work that’s valuable to society, and they could be more abstract, like encouraging civic participation and social justice, promoting arts and culture. Cruz Rivera decided to focus his presidency on increasing postsecondary value, making his primary concern not the welfare of his institution but that of its graduates and the community around it.

“As we went through the search process, during each stage, it became a little more evident that this was the kind of job description that I had been working toward,” said Cruz Rivera, who is the first Latino to lead NAU. “It had all the major elements: a big emphasis on access, student success, cultivating a teacher-scholar model rather than a high-intensity research effort, better engaging with the community, serving underserved communities. It all seemed to make sense.” 

In the immediate years prior to Cruz Rivera’s arrival, NAU had been facing an identity crisis. Like other college presidents throughout the nation, his predecessor, Rita Hartung Cheng, had taken steps to position NAU as an R1 school, confident that such a designation as a high-activity research institution would make the school much more prestigious and competitive. 

But not everyone was convinced that this was the right strategy. NAU had a limited base of financial resources and research power with which to pursue a determined campaign in the U.S. News rankings. Meanwhile, many professors and administrators felt that a hunt for prestige was less important than making NAU accessible to the community, which has been a priority since the university’s early years. When the school was founded in 1899 as a teacher’s college, it served as an economic backstop during the Depression years, when it trained up jobless people and placed them into the local workforce through New Deal programs. In the postwar years, NAU built a diverse student population and grew steadily to become competitive in enrollment with Arizona State University and the University of Arizona. Chasing cachet above all else wasn’t the NAU way.

“It just felt like a stretch,” Julie Mueller, who is currently the chief economic adviser to the president and has taught economics at NAU since 2008, said of the focus on research. Facing pushback on her vision and controversy over a state audit of her travel expenditures, Cheng decided not to renew her contract in 2021.

When Cruz Rivera was hired to replace her, he didn’t waste time getting started. In fact, he arrived in Flagstaff in April 2021, three months before he officially began his new job, to commence what he called a “learning tour.” It was important to him both to understand the campus’s needs and to get to know the university leaders whose buy-in could help him achieve his goals. To that end, he filled his cabinet with advisers who knew the campus and shared his priorities—advisers like Mueller, who had been skeptical of NAU’s prior focus. “It was really exciting to hear what [Cruz Rivera’s] vision was for the institution because it felt like something we could do really well and that resonates here,” Mueller told me.

When he formally started work, in June 2021, Cruz Rivera convened a presidential transition committee, assembling seven different university-wide working groups to chart out a strategic plan for the next three years. What emerged from that process in May 2022 was a new road map that acknowledged the school’s legacy of inclusion while updating its methods for the future. The plan is based on three main pillars: creating a universal admissions program with an academic pathway for every student who applies; making tuition-free college education available and accessible to every Arizona resident with a household income of $65,000 or below; and dramatically increasing the number of Indigenous people who enroll at NAU and finish degrees. In short, Cruz Rivera hopes to get more students from underserved backgrounds into NAU, to get them their degrees on time or even early, and to ensure that they’re civically engaged and ready for the workforce. “And we do all of this while keeping the cost affordable for students and parents,” he told me. 

Laurie Dickson, vice president for university strategy and senior associate to the president, recalled that although there was excitement about the arrival of the new president, the campus was still feeling some “skepticism” about big changes after the past few years of Cheng’s leadership. However appealing his message, Cruz Rivera was another university president coming in with big policy changes to sell—changes that would require a lot of work from faculty and administrators to implement. But, she told me, “listening to him speak, he is also very convincing because he is so authentic, and it truly aligned with the vast majority of people, especially those of us who have been here for a very long time.” 

With a plan in place, Cruz Rivera started off by making structural changes to NAU’s bureaucracy. Too often at large universities, leaders are siloed in their own offices—admissions, athletics, financial aid, academic support—and miss opportunities to collaborate. One of Cruz Rivera’s first official acts after releasing the strategic plan, in June 2022, was to announce an office of “Social Mobility and Economic Impact,” which would consider university-wide changes that could help students from underserved communities get access to an education at NAU and finish their degrees. To lead the office, Cruz Rivera brought in Jonathan S. Gagliardi, a longtime CUNY colleague who has led social mobility and student retention efforts both in that system and nationwide.

Gagliardi’s team launched into a top-to-bottom evaluation of the school’s financial aid process, which had not been updated in some time. What they found, according to Anika Olsen, vice president of enrollment management at NAU, were long-standing inequitable gaps in how the school assessed students for admission. They learned that approximately 50,000 high school students, many of them students of color, attended schools where they were only required to take 14 core courses to graduate. By comparison, NAU and the other four-year public institutions in Arizona had long required 16 core courses and a 3.0 GPA. 

“That was not equitable, and that was policy,” Olsen told me. Those admissions standards were set by the Arizona Board of Regents, which meant that statewide policy had to change. Administrators at NAU worked with Arizona State University and the University of Arizona, and in February 2022 persuaded the board to reduce the requirement from 16 core courses to 14. Now, any Arizona high school student is offered admission to NAU if they have a 2.75 or higher core GPA (based on a 4.0 scale and calculated using only the 14 required core courses).

One of the officials Cruz Rivera had to lobby to change the statewide rules was Lyndel Manson, a former chair of the Arizona Board of Regents. Manson, who was appointed by former Republican Governor Doug Ducey, heralded NAU’s decision as a bold intervention. “I think we have pigeonholed ourselves in this state in terms of who goes to college, and I think we have missed an opportunity to serve more broadly,” Manson said when the new admissions criteria were announced. “I think [this is] going to be truly important moving forward to meet the broader needs of the state.”

It is one thing to open admissions to students who had previously been shut out, quite another for those students to afford to attend. To make the latter possible, Cruz Rivera successfully lobbied for extra state funding, and last fall, the university began offering free tuition for every Arizona resident from a family with a household income of $65,000 or below. Approximately 50 percent of Arizona households currently meet this financial threshold. 

When admitted students apply for financial aid, they’re often confused by the bureaucratic language involved, especially if they’re the first in their families to attend college. So the university removed jargony terms like “Pell eligible” and instead stated plainly what the family income threshold for tuition assistance is. No longer does the university leave students second-guessing if they can even afford an education in the first place. 

These changes weren’t just serving NAU’s goals; they also were meeting the state’s workforce needs. In Arizona’s booming economy, nearly seven out of 10 jobs require some kind of education or training after high school, whether a certificate, license, or college degree. Meanwhile, as Cruz Rivera noted to me, the state ranks poorly in educational attainment and the percentage of adults with a college degree. 

One way to boost those numbers, the NAU team knew, was to lure back to campus former students who had accumulated credits but had left without earning a degree. Thanks to support from the Lumina Foundation, the university in July 2022 launched Jacks on Track—a program to attract students back to NAU who dropped out sometime in the 2020–21 academic year. (Jacks is a reference to the Lumberjack, NAU’s mascot.) Although the number of returning NAU students remains small—about 11 percent—it is still much higher than the national return rate of about 2 percent.

“When students are debating whether to come back and complete, they’re thinking, ‘How am I going to fit this into my life?’ ” Olsen told me, adding that the outreach strategy has been to focus on students who have already earned 90 or more credits and are close to reaching the 120 needed to complete the degree. 

Another way for NAU to meet the workforce needs of the state is to ensure that its curricula are aligned to the job requirements that graduates will need for the future. To that end, Cruz Rivera created the Office of Workforce Development, which works directly with businesses like the Phoenix Suns and Kind Hospitality, a restaurant management company, to make sure that students have the skills needed for work and jobs waiting for them after college. Earlier this year, NAU’s School of Hotel and Restaurant Management opened a workforce development center in partnership with Kind Hospitality near the Phoenix-Mesa airport, where undergraduate business students can train in the hospitality industry and enter a pipeline to jobs in the Phoenix area.

With programs like these, Cruz Rivera is leaning into one of the inherent strengths of institutions like NAU. Unlike elite flagships, which attract many students from out of state who then scatter across the country and the world after graduation, regional universities like NAU overwhelmingly educate in-state students who go on to build their careers in the state. This means that the money state governments spend on regional universities has, according to recent studies, a better rate of return for taxpayers than dollars spent on flagship universities. (See Zach Marcus, “Those Colleges With ‘State’ in Their Names.”) 

Cruz Rivera’s constant efforts to train low- and middle-income students for jobs in the local workforce have also helped him to avoid culture wars over “wokeness” in higher education. Even as he works to increase the diversity of NAU’s population—half of which is now people of color, slightly ahead of ASU and UA—he has avoided Republican wrath over “DEI” by relentlessly focusing on jobs.

The region around NAU has its own character and particular needs. Much of it is made up of Indian reservations. There are pockets of wealth, like Sedona, and a great deal of poverty. If the new mission of NAU was to better meet the region’s needs, Cruz Rivera realized, he was going to need to do some institution building.

One problem that has plagued the region—and the whole state, for that matter—is a shortage of physicians and access to health care, especially in rural, Indigenous, and other underserved communities. In September 2023, Cruz Rivera announced the creation of the NAU College of Medicine, which he believes will address those disparities by training doctors and partnering directly with Native American nations to fill health care gaps. Schools of medicine typically bring money and prestige to their institutions by charging high tuition to teach students in lucrative specialties like orthopedic surgery. Building a med school that prepares doctors in less lucrative specialties like primary care in order to serve the community, not the college, is rare. 

Meanwhile, to bring more Native American students to the campus, NAU made its new tuition waivers available to all Indigenous students regardless of family income. Just as importantly, to get them to graduation, Cruz Rivera needed programs to make them feel welcome and secure. He created the Seven Generations Signature Initiative, a residential community where Native American students can live together and explore Indigenous intellectual, social, and cultural life. But whereas the new medical school could be funded by tuition and grants, to pay for Seven Generations and several other key programs he turned to the private sector. 

After Cruz Rivera secured $5 million from the Mellon Foundation to bolster the school’s work with the Indigenous community, he convinced the NAU Foundation that they should match the initiative with $5 million. 

“I would have loved that when I was in college,” says Ann Marie Chischilly, vice president of Native American Initiatives, a cabinet-level position in Cruz Rivera’s administration. “You’re with students who understand your cultural obligations, your family obligations.” 

Chischilly, who is an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation (Diné), said 150 students have participated in the living-learning community. Thanks to a renewed focus on this demographic, coupled with a slew of wraparound services to provide academic and social supports, the enrolling Native American freshman class has increased by 47 percent over the past year. Indigenous students currently make up about 8 percent of NAU’s student body, up from about 5 percent last year. 

The policy reforms Cruz Rivera has made at NAU have happened in record time, according to experts I talked with who study how university leaders bring about change. And more are on the way. For instance, a statewide collaboration with 10 community college districts, including Coconino Community College, aims to boost the state’s college-going rate through dual credit programs, career and college advising, and automatic admission to four-year institutions. This last initiative will connect any applicant who doesn’t meet NAU’s academic requirements to a local community college, after which they can transfer to the university without any further application once they’re ready. A pilot program for the fall 2023 semester with CCC drew nearly 700 students from that school alone.

It’s that kind of fast-paced collaboration that has the state’s community college leaders singing Cruz Rivera’s praises. “He is the first university president that I’ve worked with who gets the mission of the community college and sees the relationship as complementary and not competitive,” Eric Heiser, the president of CCC, told me. “He and I are brothers from another mother.”

The jury is still out on what kind of long-term impact all these changes will have at NAU, and whether these efforts can or will be replicated at other institutions across the nation. What is clear is that Cruz Rivera has succeeded in turning abstract ideas about the value of college into concrete reality. And at a time when so many college leaders are averse to taking risks, his ideas are generating chatter across academe and beyond. 

Cruz Rivera likes to walk or bike the two and a half miles from his home to the campus each day. It’s an opportunity for him to interact and engage with students, who now recognize him from his presence on Instagram, where he posts selfies with community members, mini reviews of restaurants, and videos of his miniature dachshund, Jax. 

Last spring, he returned to the classroom for the first time in more than a decade, where he taught 35 first-year students in an electrical engineering course that met twice a week. He has signed up to teach the class again this fall. 

“It was exciting and nerve-racking because I had not taught in 13 years and I had never taught freshmen,” he said. “Students have changed in terms of the way that they learn and interact and so I wasn’t sure what quite to expect, but it was a remarkable experience.”

He is more sure of what kind of school he ultimately wants NAU to be. “I want to get out of the business of sending rejection letters,” he told me, “and into the business of providing options, because if somebody gets to the point where they aspire to higher education, we have to then meet them where they are and give them the options so that they can meet their full potential.”

The post The College President Who Broke Ranks appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When Jabrielle Jones enrolled at rural Clatsop Community College in Astoria, Oregon, in 2019, a placement test deemed her unready for college-level math. Jones, who has a learning disability, said she never really learned math at the small-town school in Florida where she grew up. Her special education teacher was so disengaged, Jones said, that class time was mostly study hall. “We were encouraged to sort of self-teach through workbooks,” she told me. 

Clatsop put her into MTH 70—Beginning Algebra—a “remedial” class two tiers below college-level math that would not earn her college credit. Though perhaps unsurprised, Jones was still disappointed. “I was like, ‘I’m going to be in math for years just to get to a 100-level class,’ ” she said. She considered dropping out.

Like Jones, many students entering college this fall won’t be taking college-level courses. Rather, they’ll be enrolled in a gauntlet of “developmental” math or English courses if they’re not considered “college ready”—typically not because of their ambition or talent but because of subpar preparation in high school. Disproportionately, these students will be minorities or from low-income families. Few will finish, and even fewer will graduate. In a landmark 2012 report, the nonprofit Complete College America found that “nearly 4 in 10 remedial students in community colleges never complete their remedial courses” and that “fewer than one in 10 graduate within three years.” Many will be mired in debt for courses that didn’t even earn them college credit. 

Jones, though, got a chance to skip the rest of her remedial courses when a Clatsop professor, Celeste Petersen, invited her to try an alternative to traditional remediation: a college-level math class paired with a one-credit “corequisite” companion course for students needing extra support. Petersen had begun piloting corequisites at Clatsop in 2020, following the lead of other reformers across the country who were rethinking remedial education. Jones ended up earning an A while gaining confidence in a subject she had dreaded. “I am not in love with math, and I will never be in love with math,” Jones said. “But math and I have a copacetic relationship now. I don’t fear it anymore.”

Jones’s success is no fluke. Last year, Petersen’s developmental math students passed first-year college math at a rate of 87 percent—outperforming her “college ready” students in the same classes by two percentage points. “Students are passing courses they wouldn’t even have been allowed to take before,” Petersen told me. Her students, moreover, are primarily from low-income families and diverse in age and experience. “Last term, my youngest student was 16, and my oldest student was 78,” said Petersen.

Petersen’s corequisite courses are part of a broader wave of innovation that has swept through the development education world in recent years, and rigorous evaluations also now demonstrate the effectiveness of these new approaches. When the University of Georgia system replaced traditional remedial classes with corequisites, for instance, it more than tripled the pass rates for students in introductory, “gateway” college math. Texas, Tennessee, and Louisiana have likewise seen dramatic results. 

Yet far too many students are still trapped in the morass of traditional remedial education. Fifteen years after a broad coalition of foundations, nonprofits, and educators launched a bold effort at reform, just 25 percent of colleges and universities have reformed their remedial offerings “at scale,” according to a 2020 report by the educational consultancy Tyton Partners. The many obstacles to change include an insistence on faculty autonomy, dependence on the jobs and revenue that traditional remediation generates, and perceptions of students’ needs—along with plain old inertia. 

Even at Clatsop, reform has been only partial. Until very recently, Petersen was the only one of three math instructors at the small, rural school to teach corequisite classes. Clatsop, in turn, is among only 10 of the 17 Oregon community colleges that have adopted this model—an unevenness that is emblematic of the progress of reform nationwide. Oregon’s Portland Community College, for instance, offers six different “developmental” math courses below college level, including four levels of basic and intermediate algebra, along with “math literacy.” None of these classes counts toward a degree.

Yet the need for reform today could not be greater. In the wake of the pandemic, record numbers of high school students potentially lack critical foundational skills, deepening an already dire crisis in college readiness. Average ACT scores reached a 30-year low in 2023 after falling for six straight years. And at the other end of the college pipeline, completion rates are equally disappointing: Fewer than half of first-time community college students who enrolled in 2017 earned a degree by 2023. 

Unfortunately, traditional remedial education is more likely to worsen these challenges than to solve them, impeding students’ academic progress and undermining the nation’s goal of producing a globally competitive workforce. Though certainly no silver bullet, remedial education reform is a necessary first step toward better college success and completion. Federal intervention—in the form of grants to incentivize change and robust data collection to measure progress—can revitalize momentum for reform and build on existing innovations. It’s time to finish the job. 

American remedial education is about as old as American higher education itself, and its original intent was a noble one: to broaden college access by helping under-prepared students meet the rigors of college-level work. The irony is that now it’s hurting the students it’s intended to help. 

In 1849, the University of Wisconsin established the nation’s first college-preparatory department, and by 1889, more than 80 percent of U.S. colleges and universities had followed suit. Junior colleges—what are now community colleges—took over the task beginning in the early 20th century, and in later decades, so-called developmental education was perceived as an important mechanism for promoting equity, especially for low-income and minority students handicapped by inadequate K–12 education. Remedial education became universally available and a common starting point for many students. Between 2003 and 2009 (the most recent government figures available), some 68 percent of community college students and 40 percent of four-year college students—including 58 percent of students at open-access four-year institutions like regional public universities—took at least one developmental class.

Perhaps because of its high-minded goals, no one seriously challenged the efficacy of remedial education until about two decades ago. Among the first to sound the alarm was Peter Adams, who taught developmental writing at the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) for 36 years. Beginning in the late 1980s, he began tracking the progress of his students. While the pass rates for his developmental writing classes were high, he discovered that very few of his students were going on to enroll in college-level English 101 and 102. The pass rate for English 101 among his students was just 33 percent, and among his lower-level remedial students, only about 12 percent. 

The phenomenon Adams discovered and that researchers like Thomas Bailey of the Community College Research Center (CCRC) have also documented is what reformers today call “chained attrition” or “exponential attrition”—the fact that multiple semesters of remediation create multiple exit points, compounding dropout rates over time. Or as Adams put it, the longer the pipeline, the more likely it is to spring leaks, especially if students are coping with multiple life challenges, including work and family. It’s perhaps the most significant problem with traditional remediation and why a seminal 2009 article by Camille Esch for the Washington Monthly called remedial courses higher education’s “Bermuda triangle.” Among low-income and minority students, dropout rates in remedial education are especially bleak. According to Complete College America, nearly 86 percent of Black students, 76 percent of Latino students, and 80 percent of low-income students never make it through remediation. 

Traditional remediation’s content can be as faulty as its structure. The CCRC researcher W. Norton Grubb, for instance, disparaged the typical approach in many schools as “skills and drills,” which “violate all the maxims for good teaching in adult education.” In a 2011 study of remedial education at 13 California community colleges, Grubb and his team concluded that the classes were typically “painful and tedious.” “Many of these classes we observed were relentless in their emphasis on drill and practice on small skills, without any applications to the world outside the classroom,” the researchers wrote. 

Both instructors and students see remedial education as stigmatizing and demoralizing. One such critic is Sbeydeh Viveros-Walton, who is now director of higher education for Public Advocates, a California nonprofit on the front lines of developmental education reform in the state. As a student, one of her first college experiences was remedial “basic math”—starting with addition and subtraction. “What that does to a student and their academic confidence is terrible,” she said. “It really deters them and sets them up for failure.” When the English professor Dana LeMay began teaching developmental classes at Century College, a two-year institution outside of Minneapolis, she was “horrified” by the curriculum she was given to follow. “It was insulting,” she said. “These students know how to write sentences. It was absurd, and I just felt very complicit.”

Worse still, many students likely don’t need remediation to begin with. According to a series of influential studies published by the researcher Judith Scott-Clayton, the standardized placement tests used by many colleges may incorrectly assign as many as one in four students in math and one in three students in English. Until recently, most schools relied on one of two standardized tests to determine placements. One of these was ACT’s COMPASS, which the company phased out in 2016 after mounting criticism of its inaccuracy in predicting students’ success. The other test, the College Board’s ACCUPLACER, is still used by many institutions. The University of the District of Columbia, for instance, requires all incoming students to take the exam, which the Washington Monthly once described as “a short, inexpensive, one-shot multiple-choice test of questionable accuracy and worth.”

Reformers do, however, have a good sense of what could work to fix remedial education. After discovering the discouraging data about his students, the CCBC’s Peter Adams launched what would become the nation’s first corequisite program in 2007 and a model for reform nationwide. Under the program, developmental students skipped remediation and enrolled directly into English 101, along with a one-hour companion class that met immediately after each 101 session to provide needed support. This approach both eliminated the multicourse remedial pipeline and solved the problem of stigma, since developmental and college-ready students took the same class. 

“The goal was not to make up their deficits from high school,” Adams told me. “What we were trying to do [in this program] was to help figure out what we could do to help them succeed in English 101. It was an entirely different way of thinking about the course.” Instructors helped prepare students for the next meeting of the class by reviewing the last session, working on upcoming assignments, or editing drafts for revision, among other activities. Faculty set aside time to help students with any nonacademic challenges they faced, such as coping with stress or managing finances. 

The results were almost immediate. In a 2012 evaluation, the CCRC found the pass rate for English 101 and 102 to be 75 percent and 38 percent respectively for corequisite students, compared to 39 percent and 17 percent for developmental students not in the new program. 

A corequisite was also key to the success of the Clatsop student Jabrielle Jones. 

“We were empowered to ask questions and not feel stupid,” she said. Jones’s professor, Celeste Petersen, has taught at Clatsop for eight years but began her career in K–12 education. She said she tries to promote “active learning” in her corequisite classroom, with lots of hands-on activities, minimal lectures, and as much student participation as possible. For instance, Petersen used real-life examples to illustrate problems, which led to breakthroughs in Jones’s learning. “One of my hobbies is baking—and well, that’s science and math,” Jones said. “This whole time, I’ve been doing science and math successfully as a hobby, but I just wasn’t cognitively aware. Once she started to put those things in place, it was like the synapses were finally firing on all engines.”

Other colleges copying this model have also reported significant success, and in a handful of states, such as Tennessee and Texas, which were among the first to adopt corequisites, the approach is now universal. In Tennessee, for instance, a 2022 study found that for students with the lowest reading placement scores, corequisites narrowed the completion gap for college-level as compared to “college ready” students from 35 percentage points to 19. Pass rates also rose by 17 percentage points for Black students and 14 points for Hispanic students (although disparities remain in comparison to whites). 

In the meantime, a spate of philanthropic and federal investment was also helping to build a strong road map for reform, along with an evidence base for promising practices. In 2009, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pledged $110 million to support the nation’s first major developmental education reform initiative, launched by the nonprofit Achieving the Dream. Other big-name philanthropies, like the Lumina Foundation, Ascendium, and the Kresge Foundation followed suit, while the U.S. Department of Education established a research center dedicated to developmental education. In 2010, President Barack Obama’s White House Summit on Community Colleges focused on developmental education reform as a strategy for improving college completion. These infusions of philanthropic and federal support enabled research to validate the case for reform, allowed colleges to try out potential fixes, and paid for rigorous evaluations to see if interventions worked. Achieving the Dream, for instance, provided each of 15 community colleges with grants of $743,000 over three years to experiment with developmental education reform. Grants also helped pay for faculty professional development, technical assistance, and transition costs.

While corequisites may have been the most dramatic reform to emerge from these efforts, other important innovations also emerged. Among these is the use of “multiple measures” in addition to testing, such as high school GPA, to reduce the risk of mis-assignment to remediation. At California’s Long Beach City College, which pioneered this approach, the share of first-time students assigned to college-level math jumped from 9 percent to 30 percent once the school considered high school performance, not just test scores. Meanwhile, pass rates for college-level courses remained relatively unchanged, “suggesting that students who were moved into the courses were as capable of passing them as their peers,” a later study noted.

Another promising reform has been to end the traditional insistence on college algebra for all students, including those not majoring in STEM. Instead, students are routed toward curricula relevant to their course of study, such as quantitative reasoning or statistics—an approach called “pathways.” At Paris Junior College in rural north Texas, for instance, students choose one of three college-level math sequences: quantitative reasoning for liberal arts, fine arts, and humanities majors; statistics for those in social sciences, nursing, and health professions; and algebra to calculus for students studying science, engineering, business, and accounting, or aspiring to teach math. 

“We’re not trying to give students an easier path or an easier option,” Ed McCraw, dean of math and sciences at Paris Junior College, told me. “We’re trying to give them relevant math courses that they can actually use in their degree plan and then throughout their lives in their jobs.” 

Given that fewer than a fifth of college algebra students are in majors that require calculus (the only practical reason to learn algebra), pathways “are a better way to get students to see themselves as mathematical learners and thinkers,” said Amy Getz, a senior program associate at the nonprofit WestEd who helped pioneer math pathways curricula. When the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching released its “Statway” and “Quantway” curricula for statistics and quantitative reasoning in the early 2010s, it tallied success rates of 61 percent (Statway) and 75 percent (Quantway) over 10 years. 

 As a result of these efforts, reformers chalked up major legislative and policy wins in many states, as part of efforts to scale up promising reforms. Peter Adams, for instance, said he crisscrossed the country beginning in the early years of reform, ultimately visiting schools in at least 43 states to consult with them on corequisite implementation. “I stopped counting after 250 schools adopted it,” he said. National and statewide conferences on developmental education reform were frequent and well attended.

Thirty-three states now have state- or system-wide policies that address at least some aspect of developmental education, such as placement or curriculum, according to a 2022 analysis by the Center for the Analysis of Postsecondary Readiness (CAPR). Florida, for instance, ended mandatory remediation in 2014, and in 2017, California passed landmark legislation that required community colleges to use multiple measures for placement and to “maximize the probability” that students finish college-level math and English classes within their first year—in effect establishing a legal right for students to enroll directly into college-level courses and bypass remediation. 

Not enough students, however, are experiencing the benefits of reform. More than a dozen states have no identifiable state- or system-wide policies on developmental education, including Alaska, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Maine, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Utah, among others, according to a 2021 50-state comparison by the Education Commission of the States. The 2020 Tyton Partners study found that even among schools reporting themselves “at scale” with reforms, 24 percent said traditional, multi-semester remedial sequences still composed more than half of the developmental courses offered. In a 2023 webinar sponsored by the nonprofit Strong Start to Finish, WestEd’s Amy Getz and the college completion expert Bruce Vandal identified just five states that were truly at scale or close to it, which they defined as all students having the opportunity to enroll directly in gateway math and English courses aligned to their chosen course of study in their first year, with access to appropriate supports (such as corequisites). These states are Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee, and California. 

Reformers like Adams say their phones haven’t rung as often, especially since the pandemic. “The steam in pushing these reforms has been lost,” said one longtime advocate who spoke on condition of anonymity. 

A commitment to institutional or faculty autonomy is one reason reforms have been uneven. Oregon’s community colleges, for instance, are each independently governed. “We are not a ‘system’ in any way, shape, or form,” Elizabeth Cox Brand, executive director of the Oregon Community College Association’s Student Success Center, told me. While Brand has secured grants and technical support to encourage developmental education reform, she can’t force schools to come on board. “We’ve hit this point where we’ve exhausted the coalition of the willing,” she said. 

Many faculty are also reluctant to abandon a model of teaching they may have pursued their entire career. When confronted by reform, “it’s like their sense of professional identity gets challenged,” said Katie Hern, an English professor at Skyline College in San Bruno, California, who has been one of California’s leading reform advocates. Other instructors worry about the welfare of students, especially for those in accelerated corequisite classes. “There’s still a lot of resistance from people saying, ‘How can someone pass a college math class who hasn’t already taken all of this other math?’ Clatsop professor Celeste Petersen said. 

Faculty and other stakeholders also felt left out of the process when legislative victories in the early years of reform brought rapid, widespread change. “Faculty want control over their classrooms,” Bruce Vandal acknowledged. “It’s a bit unusual to have a state legislator decide you can’t teach [remedial] courses anymore after having it be a fundamental part of what community colleges have been doing forever.” Connecticut, for instance, ended up overhauling its reform efforts after faculty and administrators objected to legislation they said was too prescriptive and burdensome. In other instances, obstacles to reform have been practical. “It’s an open secret that developmental education pays for other parts of the institution,” said a foundation official who spoke on condition of anonymity. While reformers argue faculty can be reassigned and revenue recouped through increased enrollment in college-level classes, the sheer volume of remedial classes can still generate significant revenue, especially if taught by inexpensive adjunct faculty. Collectively, students and their families spend about $1.3 billion a year on remedial education, according to a 2018 study by CAPR.

Reforms like corequisite education can also pose logistical hurdles for some schools. In North Carolina, for instance, where some of the state’s 63 community colleges serve as few as 400 students, scheduling corequisite classes was “very difficult” because of timing and staffing constraints. “We saw a decrease in students attempting gateway courses,” said James Kelley, associate vice president of student services for the North Carolina Community College System Office. 

The biggest barrier to reform is the lack of quick fixes, such as simply swapping out textbooks. Scaling reform requires change that is both “structural and cultural,” Victoria Ballerini, associate director of Strong Start to Finish, told me. “It’s a lot.” 

Nevertheless, revitalizing remedial education reform would bring immense benefits to U.S. students. In their 2023 webinar, Getz and Vandal argued that if every state were to replicate Tennessee’s results with developmental education reform, 226,618 additional students would finish gateway math and English every year, including more than 100,000 who are Latino or Black. Students would save time and money while earning college credits, sidestepping a major obstacle to college completion and putting themselves on a path to a more secure future.

While philanthropy led the way 15 years ago, kickstarting reform and showing what’s achievable, it’s now the federal government’s turn to step up with renewed investment. In particular, Congress could help by providing reformers the two things they most need: money and data. First, it could award competitive grants, available directly to colleges or college systems, to defray the costs of implementing reform, including technical assistance, transition expenses, and the all-important task of engaging faculty and providing professional development opportunities. Grants could also pay for schools to experiment with new models of developmental support. While corequisites remain the current gold standard for curriculum reform, many students still aren’t succeeding and may need a different form of help. Most importantly, the allure of extra funds could help to overcome reform’s biggest enemy: inertia. 

These grants, moreover, would not need to be enormous to make a difference. In West Virginia, for instance, which adopted statewide corequisite education in 2013, reformers credit some relatively modest philanthropic grants as instrumental to their success. Corley Dennison, vice chancellor for academic affairs at the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission, told me the funds helped pay for a variety of faculty outreach and training opportunities that helped promote reform. “We gave stipends for course development and stipends for travel—things like that to show that we were willing to put up money and willing to support them,” he told me. Ultimately, he said, “I found champions among the faculty who were very excited about this and realized how well co-req was working.” As a result, he continued, “we were able to convince a large number of the schools to go with corequisites before we even wrote the policy.” 

Second, the federal government should make substantial investments in data collection around remedial education and the impacts of reform. Comprehensive current national data on the number of students assigned to remedial education each year and their outcomes does not exist. While some states now closely track student participation in developmental education, the federal government’s most recent analysis of remedial course taking was in 2016, based on data drawn from the 2003–2009 Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study. Though the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study provides some data, including on racial and economic disparities in remediation, the survey occurs only every three to four years and prioritizes information about student financial aid. 

Better national data would help define the scope of the problem left to solve, particularly in states slower to embrace reform. Knowing how many students are in remediation each year and their trajectory through college could arm reformers with the evidence needed to build their case; knowing who is in these classes could help illuminate inequities in access to college-level work. Reliable data standardized across states would also clarify the effectiveness of reforms, which would in turn inform policy choices and course design. Finally, better data could help states and systems measure their progress and identify additional barriers to student success. 

The ultimate impact would be the transformation of individual lives. After passing college math with the help of her corequisite class, Jabrielle Jones earned her associate’s degree from Clatsop and is now enrolled at Portland State University, at the age of 40, to earn a long-delayed bachelor’s degree in urban development. She credits Celeste Petersen for opening the door to these opportunities. “I’m finally not poverty stricken anymore because I have an education,” Jones said. Her only regret is the delay she experienced in pursuing her degree. “If co-req had existed when I started,” she told me, “I would have finished my associate’s three years earlier.”

Anne Kim is the author of the FutureEd Report Incomplete: The Unfinished Revolution in College Remediation, from which the piece is adapted.

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In the 52 years since the enactment of Title IX—the federal law prohibiting discrimination in education on the basis of sex—women have made tremendous strides in closing educational gaps that once seemed insurmountable. Women now make up about 60 percent of college students in the United States and earn 56 percent of law school degrees. They also outnumber men in undergraduate communications programs by nearly two to one. In the humanities, graduate-level enrollments flew past parity decades ago. Today, about 60 percent of master’s and more than half of doctoral degrees awarded in the field go to women. 

Yet, despite the steady progress, women still lag in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)—accounting for just 39 percent of bachelor’s degrees, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The more technical the degree, the fewer women. Women received only about a fifth of the mechanical and electrical engineering degrees conferred in 2022, for example. The result is that women make up only a third of the workforce in STEM industries, including just 17 percent of engineers. 

This underrepresentation is a major problem for several reasons. First, America is facing a shortage of the scientists and engineers needed in some of our fastest-growing industries. The U.S. semiconductor sector, for instance, will have about 67,000 unfilled jobs by the end of this decade. The simplest way to meet this human resource demand is for more women—the group that makes up the majority of undergraduate students—to major and graduate in STEM fields. The boost to American prosperity and competitiveness would be phenomenal. 

More women in STEM fields of study won’t just mean a bigger tech workforce, though—it’ll mean a better one, as well. A diversity of backgrounds and perspectives on teams working on complex problems leads to better solutions and more breakthroughs. If personnel is policy in government, personnel is performance in STEM. 

Just as importantly, getting more women in STEM will ease the gender pay gap in the United States. Today, STEM industries make up 69 percent of the U.S. GDP, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that in all, an additional 1.1 million STEM jobs will be created by 2032. According to a 2021 Pew Research Center analysis, full-time workers 25 and older in STEM fields make over $30,000 more than their counterparts in non-STEM jobs. Earning a high salary means working in STEM. 

For many years, the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields was blamed on a lack of interest—or even on genetic differences. In a speech in 2005, then Harvard University President Larry Summers suggested that innate disparities between men and women might explain the underrepresentation of women in science and math careers. The remark in part cost him his job, but the notion hasn’t gone away. In 2017, a Google engineer named James Damore authored a widely circulated internal memo that claimed women’s biology makes them less adept at working in technology jobs than men. (For this, Damore, too, lost his job.) 

We at the Washington Monthly know these explanations are nonsense. Why? Because we’ve run the numbers. Using data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, we compared the gender distribution of every STEM program at 1,027 U.S. colleges and universities—an exercise no other media outlet has done. We then ranked the 20 undergraduate programs with the highest and lowest percentage of recent graduates who are female in 10 popular STEM fields—computer science, chemical engineering, natural resources, and so on. (The rankings are available here and at the bottom of this page.)

Look at the “lowest percent female” rankings and you’ll notice that some large public and private universities—Brigham Young, Auburn, the University of Arizona—have embarrassingly small percentages of women in some of their STEM programs. But the “highest percent female” rankings show that women are overrepresented in STEM programs at some of the most selective universities in the country. At Carnegie Mellon, women make up 50.8 percent of the student body, but 62.1 percent of the chemistry graduates and 66.1 percent of the civil engineers. Women are overrepresented, too, in the chemical engineering department at Columbia, the mechanical engineering department at MIT, the natural resources department at George Washington, and other leading programs.

It is hard to square these extraordinarily high rates of women succeeding in STEM at elite universities with the notion that women aren’t interested or can’t compete with men in these endeavors. Misogynists might assert (without evidence) that these colleges are lowering their standards for women. But if that’s the case, corporate America must be in on the conspiracy—according to our data, women in these programs earn the same high salaries as men five years after graduating. In our rankings, we combine men’s and women’s income five years out because the differences are so miniscule, but in some fields, like computer science, women actually earn more.

If women are choosing and succeeding in STEM in high percentages at some universities, what explains the dismal percentages at others? The answer, according to numerous studies and my own reporting, is that getting women into and through STEM programs requires colleges to reduce the barriers that have kept them out of these male-dominated fields for years. It’s not easy, but it’s not rocket science either.

One barrier is that women enter college with relatively less preparation in STEM and consequently fear they can’t catch up. To overcome that obstacle, the University of Washington split its introductory computer science course into a three-quarter sequence. Students can choose to start with the first class, which is geared toward those with no experience; the second class, which is for students who have some familiarity with coding; or the third class, which is for those who took AP computer science in high school or have a similar proficiency. All the students wind up at the same level by the end; only their entry points are different. As a result, 47.1 percent of graduating computer and information science students are women, placing it fourth on our list. 

Another difficulty women thinking about majoring in STEM careers must overcome is the high testosterone culture of many such programs. New York University, which ranks sixth on our list of chemical engineering programs, has dealt with that problem, in part, by setting aside a floor in a dorm for female STEM students to live together and support each other. There is also a highly structured mentorship program that requires at least eight meetings per semester. 

A lack of female professors in STEM departments is yet another hurdle. Research shows that having female representation among faculty can help women students see themselves as belonging in the field. But the academic pipeline to STEM professorships for women is itself riddled with obstacles. Many women in academia and especially in STEM departments report unsupportive or openly hostile work environments that don’t allow for a work-life balance conducive to having children. Today, only about 28 percent of faculty in STEM fields are women. 

Cornell has long emphasized the importance of recruiting female faculty. In 2006, the university received an ADVANCE grant from the National Science Foundation to support this work. After the grant ended in 2013, Cornell’s Women in Science and Engineering group, which was formed in the late 1990s, stepped in to continue the work. The group has pushed for pay equity for initial salary offerings and for more even distribution of lab start-up funds. On average, just 19.6 percent of tenured and tenure track professors in engineering programs in the U.S. are women, but women made up 29 percent of engineering professors at Cornell last year. (The rate was only 10 percent in 2006, the year Cornell received the ADVANCE grant.) Cornell appears in the top 10 on our computer and information science ranking, our computer science ranking, and all four of our engineering categories. 

Other interventions require more money and resources. Tuskegee University, which ranks fourth for women graduating with chemical and electrical engineering degrees and 10th for women pursuing biology degrees, hosts a summer science camp to bring high school students from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds to campus. Funded by a grant from NASA, participants get a chance to take part in lab-based research projects, get career counseling, and hear guest speakers talk about how they navigated their paths as scientists and engineers. While the program is open to men, more women apply. And many of those women eventually matriculate to Tuskegee and go on to major in a STEM field. Once enrolled, students have access to a variety of supports, including opportunities to work with faculty in a lab and career mentorship. 

Another way to get more women into STEM fields is to stress the positive impact they can have on society with their degree. “We try to focus our course descriptions, research, and outreach on the idea that computing can help the world,” says Ed Lazowska, the former chair of the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. “We make it clear that the reason to have faster processors is you can do better things for society.” For Lecia Robinson, an assistant professor of biology at Tuskegee, a STEM degree brought an opportunity to study diseases that affect women. “That was a big determining factor for why I went into STEM,” says Robinson, who investigates the mitochondrial function in breast cancer types that affect Black women. “Hopefully my research will help create more treatment options.”

While most of the top-performing schools in our rankings are elite private colleges and flagship state universities, there are plenty of exceptions. For example, Winston-Salem State University, a historically Black public university 80 miles northeast of Charlotte, North Carolina, has the fifth-highest-ranked computer and information sciences program in the country thanks to its Women in Science Program, which includes mentorships, small-group research projects, and forums that address alternative careers in STEM. Other non-famous public institutions—New Mexico State, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Eastern Washington University—achieve similarly impressive results.

Successes like these mean there is no good reason why other non-elite public universities can’t do a far better job of recruiting and graduating women in their STEM programs. And since those institutions are where the vast majority of U.S. college students earn their degrees, increasing their output of women STEM graduates would go a long way toward eliminating a costly and unjust gap in America’s human capital and fulfilling, finally, the promise of Title IX.

Through a production error, the wrong data was displayed for the best and worst colleges for natural resources. We have corrected that data below and regret the error. —Eds.

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Let’s say you want to get a master’s degree in one of America’s most popular and growing fields. Perhaps you’re looking to study nursing or educational administration, or you want to earn an MBA. You wouldn’t be alone; these are all extremely popular master’s degrees, each offered by hundreds of universities. And therein lies the problem—how to decide?

Picking a master’s program might end up being one of the biggest choices you ever make, and yet surprisingly little guidance is out there. Around the country, tuition and enrollment for master’s programs just keep going up, while earnings for degree holders have barely budged since 2000. Programs are often expensive, with little financial aid, which means that few schools can offer any guarantee that graduates will be able to pay off the debt they took on. How can you know if the program you’re considering will actually pay off?

Almost no one has attempted to assess this question in a systematic way. U.S. News & World Report has a ranking for some (but not all) of the most popular master’s degree fields, like social work, nursing, and communication disorders. But its rankings largely ignore how much programs cost or how much debt students tend to graduate with. With the exception of their business school rankings, U.S. News’s standings of popular master’s degree programs don’t even factor in how much students tend to earn after they graduate.

If you Google master’s programs in, say, counseling psychology, you’ll likely stumble across sites like BestCounselingDegrees.net and Psychology.org, which appear to be trustworthy consumer guides but are in fact largely unhelpful, possibly AI-written, algorithmically boosted content mills both owned by the same shady holding company, Red Ventures. 

At the Washington Monthly, we want to finally empower master’s degree applicants to make informed choices. That’s why we are unveiling a new set of rankings, our “Best and Worst Colleges for Master’s Degrees.” (The rankings are available here and at the bottom of this page.) We assess master’s degree programs in the 10 most popular fields—business, educational administration, nursing, teacher education, social work, and so on—based on two fundamental questions that students are asking: How much debt will I graduate with, and how much money can I expect to earn? 

For data, we relied on the federal government’s College Scorecard, which, as of this spring, provides a highly revealing statistic: the median annual earnings of graduates five years after they attended a program. Ours is the first-ever ranking of master’s degrees to include this statistic. We combined it with students’ median debt at graduation to calculate debt as a percentage of earnings, a statistic that makes for easy comparison across programs. 

Spend a few moments perusing the rankings, and you’ll notice a couple of striking patterns. First, there are vast differences in earnings and debt between colleges on the “Best” and “Worst” rankings in the same fields of study. Some programs pay off magnitudes better than others. Second, many of the “Worst” performers are colleges and universities that enjoy sterling national reputations, while some of the “Best” are humble institutions, many of them regional public universities that you might never have heard of. 

For instance, prestigious Northwestern University offers a master’s in counseling that saddles average graduates with $153,657 in debt, while graduates of the program earn on average only $56,897 annually five years later. Debt as a percentage of earnings for the program is 270 percent, which puts it in the number one spot on our “Worst Clinical, Counseling, and Applied Psychology” ranking.

Contrast that with the number seven school on the “Best” ranking in that field, Aurora University, which is located only 55 miles away from Northwestern. Students at Aurora’s addiction-focused mental health masters (classified under the same “Clinical, Counseling, and Applied Psychology” umbrella by the government) graduate with an average debt of $27,588, close to one-sixth as much as Northwestern grads, and make 34 percent higher salaries ($76,132) five years out. Cal State Long Beach, Florida Tech, and CUNY–Baruch College have master’s programs under that same umbrella, where the ratio of debt to income is at least 10 times lower than Northwestern. (For more on Northwestern’s predatory behavior, see my investigation here.)

The pattern is the same in other fields of study. A master’s degree in nursing from Yale University might look impressive on your wall, but it’ll burden you with an average debt of $118,849 when you graduate. For the same degree from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, you’ll borrow only $23,302, one-fifth as much, and still earn slightly more than the Yalies ($133,871 versus $128,563). 

A master’s in social work from the prestigious University of Southern California will leave you $125,849 in debt for the privilege of making $72,091 annually five years later. With the same credential from San Diego State, you’ll make nearly $4,867 more a year and carry about one-sixth the debt. You can get a master’s in educational administration at the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania, earn $74,964 a year, and be shackled with $55,857 in debt; or make more ($86,863) and borrow six times less ($8,973) by attending Miami University–Oxford. 

How do elite universities like Northwestern, Yale, USC, and Penn get away with ripping off students when there are far better options at other, perfectly respectable colleges? Because the government lets them. By law, the amount of federally backed loans students can take out for undergraduate degrees is capped. But in 2005, a Republican Congress passed, and President George W. Bush signed, legislation creating an uncapped federal graduate degree loan program as part of a budget reconciliation package. Predictably, the creation of an uncapped program incentivized colleges to raise tuition rates even faster for master’s programs than for bachelor’s programs. Despite representing only 21 percent of students in higher education, graduate students took out 47 percent of all federal loans in 2021–22. 

Hundreds of colleges have taken advantage of the uncapped subsidy and lax regulatory environment by starting up or expanding master’s programs, in part to make up for demographically driven enrollment declines at the undergrad level. But elite nonprofit colleges have the brand names students want and so have been able to get away with charging astronomical tuition for programs that don’t deliver. 

Having helped create the problem, Washington needs to fix it. And there are new Republican-sponsored bills floating around Capitol Hill to impose caps on federal loans for graduate programs. But until they pass, the only way prospective students can avoid making life-altering mistakes is to arm themselves with good information. 

Of course, master’s degrees often pay off. Adults with master’s degrees earn, on average, roughly $13,000 more per year than those who have only a bachelor’s degree. They can be good investments of your time and money—but it all depends on where you make that investment. 

Our rankings are a good place to begin to figure that out. But they only show results for some schools and programs. Data for any we do not include can be found on the Department of Education’s College Scorecard site by searching for an institution, navigating to “Fields of Study,” clicking “See All Fields of Study,” and searching for a particular field and degree level. There you’ll find the median debt at graduation and the median income after five years, which we’ve used to construct this ranking. We encourage you to do that for any program you might be considering, or one your friends or relatives might be considering. It might save them from decades of crippling debt.

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Like most graduates of Northwestern’s online master’s of arts in counseling program, Joe Vegas is buried in debt. 

A Buffalo-based mental health counselor, Vegas graduated in 2019 from Northwestern’s counseling program, having taken out around $189,000 in student debt. Now that he’s five years out of school and fully licensed, he told me, he’s on track to make $62,400 in 2024, which he considers to be a good year.

“We all just laugh,” Vegas told me about when he talks to other Northwestern grads. It’s the only thing they can do. “That’ll never get paid. Ever.”

Fifty-five miles from Northwestern, in an unfashionable west-of-Chicago suburb, lies Aurora University. The scrappy, unassuming institution offers an addiction-focused mental health master’s degree, also mostly online. It’s classified under the same counseling umbrella as Northwestern’s, but it has very different outcomes. Aurora students graduate with an average of $27,588 in debt, around six times less than the median debt of students in Northwestern’s program, $153,657. Five years later, they earn an average annual salary of $76,132, roughly $20,000 more than the $56,897 Northwestern grads bring in. 

“We are an exceptionally frugal place,” Brenda Barnwell, the dean of Aurora’s College of Education and Social Work, told me. “We’re not, you know, popping up new buildings like crazy.” For her, online classes have gone a long way toward solving a parking shortage on campus—not a long way toward unlocking more money from students’ wallets. “We’re a Hispanic-serving institution, and the vast majority of our students are first generation,” she explained. “Working on keeping those tuition dollars at a minimum has made a big difference for [them].” 

Aurora’s program is not well known, despite its stellar debt and income statistics. U.S. News & World Report ranks social work programs but not counseling programs, and their social work ranking (like most of their master’s degree rankings) just shows the results of an insider survey meant to measure prestige, factoring in neither how much the program costs nor how much graduates tend to earn down the line. 

To fill that gap, the Washington Monthly created a new set of rankings (see “America’s Best and Worst Colleges for Master’s Degrees”). Using recently released data from the federal government’s College Scorecard, we assess master’s degree programs in the 10 most popular fields—business, educational administration, nursing, teacher education, social work, and so on—based on how much debt students graduate with, and how much they can expect to earn five years later. 

While Northwestern’s program, with around 300 graduates per year, is among the worst offenders in the entire master’s program marketplace, it is by no means the only predatory program. There are 631 master’s degree programs where the median debt at graduation exceeds the median income five years after graduation, making up 11 percent of all master’s programs for which there is federal data. Each year, more such programs spring up, as a new school picks up on the game and existing programs raise tuition. According to a report from the Century Foundation, AEI, and Education-Counsel, outstanding federal loans to graduate schools have gone from $37 billion to $90 billion in just the last seven years, and median graduate loan balances have gone from $21,800 to $57,800 in just the last 10 years. Meanwhile, the earnings premium afforded to those with master’s degrees hasn’t budged in decades, according to a study by Kristin Blagg at the Urban Institute. 

Jason Delisle, another Urban Institute researcher, has been studying the rising cost and increasing ubiquity of master’s degree programs for years. As Delisle told me, colleges’ motives in opening new programs aren’t hard to parse: “They’ve been opening master’s degrees because they make money.” Students can borrow their full cost of attendance from the federal government, which includes room and board, and the government will pay for the program up front, which means universities have no incentive to keep costs down or make sure that students can pay off their debt.  

First enacted as part of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005—passed by Republican majorities in Congress and signed by President George W. Bush—uncapped graduate school loans were thought to save the government money because they’d have higher interest rates and be easily repayable by most students. Income-driven repayment plans followed shortly after for the few students expected to have trouble paying them back. These plans were then scaled up in 2010 and again earlier this year in response to the debt crisis these loans had helped create.  

After between 10 and 25 years (depending on the amount of debt and whether a graduate is in a public service job) of monthly repayments on an income-driven repayment plan, the remaining balance is forgiven. For the next two decades, Joe Vegas and many others in his Northwestern cohort will likely owe the federal government six-figure debt, fail to pay it off, and, eventually, see the balance forgiven at the taxpayer’s expense. 

At the 7 percent of programs that Delisle classifies as having “very high” debt to earnings, graduates can expect to see about $75,000 of debt forgiven, on average, after 20 years of paying toward their loan balance but never getting close to paying it all off. 

For schools looking at the many prospective students willing to use uncapped federal loans to get their dream job, Delisle said, the only limit to the number of grad programs they open and the tuition they charge is how much they think they can get away with. And at schools with prestige and name recognition, that number seems to only get higher. Private nonprofit colleges are usually the most cynical offenders, dominating our rankings of programs that have the highest debt relative to earnings. 

The students who graduate from such programs are financially trapped. If they get on an income-driven repayment plan, then they are spared from poverty, but if they ever do too well for themselves, the difference between their salary and a middling income will be siphoned off to pay for the massive loan (and its interest). Vegas, who’s on such a plan, usually makes so little money that his monthly payments are set at zero; now that he’s having a good year, he’ll likely pay a few hundred dollars a month in 2025. He’s looking to buy a small home, but he’s been rejected by almost every bank he’s applied to, and still lives in a rented apartment. 

Of course, as Vegas has experienced, when considering a loan application for a house, a car, or almost any large purchase, creditors usually require you to put some money down and show some likelihood of being able to pay it off someday. That’s not the case for master’s programs. If you were to go to a sports car dealership and ask for a $189,000 car loan with 0 percent down and an income of under $57,000 a year—precisely the deal Northwestern offered Vegas—you’d be laughed out of the building (and be safe from crippling debt). Unlike the car dealer or the mortgage lender, Northwestern doesn’t care if you pay back your loans. They’ve already got the money. 

When prospective students seek out resources to help them compare programs, they often find rankings that either prize prestige, not outcomes, like U.S. News’s social work rankings, or worse, search-engine-optimized consumer guides that use irrelevant undergraduate or university-wide data to rank master’s degrees, like Psychology.org’s counseling program rankings. The Wall Street Journal has an interactive that shows average debts and incomes two years after graduation across programs, but it’s behind a paywall. 

Overwhelmed—or perhaps underwhelmed—prospective students often resort to asking for information from schools directly. 

And that’s when the salespeople intervene.  

“I signed up as someone who was interested and wanted more information about the program,” Sofia—who requested that we use only her first name—told me of her experience in the summer of 2019. “And the next day I got a recruitment call.”

According to Sofia, her recruitment agent was relentless, calling her almost daily and remembering every detail he heard. “He name-dropped some of my professors,” she said. “He remembered my pets’ names.” 

She expressed to him that the program seemed too expensive, with a tuition (not including housing or any other costs) of between $133,824 and $190,440, depending on the track. But the recruitment agent countered, selling her on the “incredible power of being able to say that you went to Northwestern.” 

This “incredible power,” as Sofia recalls him saying, is not recognized by the market. Northwestern’s median earnings five years after graduation, $56,897, are markedly lower than the median master’s program in this category: $63,675. 

That recruitment agent worked for 2U, a private, for-profit online education program management company which also runs the online infrastructure that Northwestern’s master’s program uses—software that, one alum told me, she felt was constantly having “technological glitches” and felt “clunky and old.” Though 2U’s exact compensation from Northwestern isn’t publicly disclosed, the company’s standard deals with universities in 2019 involved keeping 60 percent or more of tuition revenues. (More recently, 2U has reduced its standard revenue-sharing fee for degree programs to 35 percent.) 

If each student paid around $67,000 in tuition each year, annual revenues would be in the neighborhood of $20 million, much of which would be taken off the top by 2U.

The company—which is currently undergoing a financial restructuring—has faced criticism for this model in the past. A 2021 Wall Street Journal exposé skewered the University of Southern California’s master’s of social work program, which used 2U to recruit thousands of students, leading to a since-dismissed lawsuit against both 2U and USC. Last fall, the USC School of Social Work dropped its affiliation with 2U—paying them $40 million to sever the deal—and announced that it would run all its online master’s programs in-house. But if the university will save money with that move, it seems not yet to have passed on the savings to students. The list price of its MSW online program remains about the same. That program ranks last in our social work rankings.

Yet USC’s program is still financially far less ruinous for its graduates than Northwestern’s. The median debt as a percentage of income for graduates of USC’s MSW program, 175 percent, pales in comparison to Northwestern counseling’s 270 percent. As one former core faculty of the Northwestern program told me, the remaining tuition dollars that the university keeps—after 2U takes its cut—hardly seemed to be spent on the master’s program itself, which appears to involve only 13 total faculty and administrators. Of course, there’s no shortage of things to spend money on at Northwestern, both inside and outside of the Family Institute, which houses the program. The Family Institute serves 7,500 clients a year in family therapy, and Northwestern University runs a prestigious undergraduate program with generous financial aid and scores of fully funded PhD programs. 

I reached out to Anthony Chambers, the head of the Northwestern counseling program, to ask him why the debt for students in its master’s program was so high in comparison to the salaries the students typically earn. Three weeks later, Sarah Frick, the chief external relations officer for the Family Institute, emailed me a prepared statement that touted the $1.8 million in scholarships that they give out—an average of $6,000 for each of their 300 yearly graduates—and noted that Illinois has “only 14 behavioral health professionals per 10,000 residents.” The program is overwhelmingly online and none of the alumni I spoke with live in Illinois.  

For the time being, predatory nonprofit master’s programs seem all too safe. 

The government tends mostly to focus on transparency, hoping that open data will help students make more prudent decisions and inspire universities to clean up their act when they see peer institutions charging less and delivering more. 

There are some exceptions to this focus on transparency, including the occasional penalty for misleading students, like the $37.7 million fine President Joe Biden’s Department of Education imposed on for-profit Grand Canyon University last year for misrepresenting an approximately $55,000 doctorate as costing only around $45,000 (Northwestern’s counseling degree costs far more). Or the $700,000 fine levied on Temple University for misrepresenting its online MBA. Many fines are even smaller.

Another exception is the Biden administration’s new “gainful employment” rule, which applies only to for-profit colleges and certificate programs at nonprofit universities. To understand how limiting this restriction is, consider that for-profit schools educate only about 8 percent of postsecondary students. For the schools to which it applies, the rule states that for a program to receive federal funding and be part of the federal student loan program, the average annual loan payment amount (if the student were to pay it off in 10 years) must not exceed a certain percentage of the median graduate’s income. For a master’s program where graduates average a salary of $50,000, median debt couldn’t exceed $62,500, and for a master’s program where graduates average a salary of $75,000, median debt couldn’t exceed $112,400. 

If Northwestern were to face this test, it would decisively fail. But it doesn’t face this test, because of its nonprofit status, which it has attained by essentially making sure to spend all of its profits or stash them away in its $14 billion endowment. Many of the master’s programs that adorn the bottom of our rankings would fail this test as well, but they don’t face it for the same reason—they’re nonprofit. 

Accreditors also tend to stand idly by, imposing standards on programs’ faculty, curriculum, and assessment, but never on costs. As Sylvia Fernandez, the president of CACREP, the private accreditor in charge of counseling programs, told me, “It’s the institution’s prerogative to set tuition and fees.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. There is room for bipartisan congressional action and for increased regulatory scrutiny, if the political will is there. And it ought to be. 

The College Cost Reduction Act, introduced this year by North Carolina Representative Virginia Foxx and cosponsored by 146 other House Republicans, caps master’s degree federal loans at $24,250 annually. The Urban Institute’s Jason Delisle himself recommended a similar cap to me of around $60,000 in lifetime loans for a master’s degree. The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank like Urban, also recommends a cap on federal loans for graduate borrowing. The main downside of a cap is that it would limit the ability of some students, especially those from lower-income backgrounds, to access higher-priced master’s programs, though a cap would also help save those students from, in many cases, crippling debt.

Another possible solution involves the gainful employment rule. The Department of Education claims that it doesn’t have the statutory authority to expand the rule to nonprofit degree programs, which may well be correct, especially after recent Supreme Court decisions that sharply limit the ability of agencies to flexibly interpret their own statutory authority. But that only strengthens the case for legislation that definitively gives the Education Department the power to regulate these programs. 

If not forced to, universities could choose to clean up their act themselves. And we hope they do. It’s very possible to run a master’s degree program—even in a popular, growing field in which salaries aren’t high, like counseling—without dooming most of your graduates to decades of financial ruin. Just ask Aurora University, or any of the other programs in the “Best” category of our master’s degree rankings.

The post How Predatory Master’s Programs Get Away With It appeared first on Washington Monthly.

So-called elite colleges and universities have been under the microscope for the last few years, and that has only intensified since campus protests at the onset of the war between Israel and Hamas garnered national attention. These institutions have been the subject of congressional hearings and constant media coverage, and they are unlikely to escape public scrutiny anytime soon.

But here at the Monthly, we aren’t laser focused on the Columbias and Harvards of the world, which serve a privileged few, but on the much broader group of colleges where the vast majority of students get their educations—and on how well all of them advance social mobility. After all, colleges receive hundreds of billions of dollars each year in subsidies from federal, state, and local government in addition to the tuition they charge. So students and taxpayers have a right to know how well those schools are fulfilling their mandate to make the American dream possible.  

In that spirit, we present our annual list of Best Bang for the Buck colleges in 2024—schools that do a good job helping students of modest means earn reasonably priced degrees that help them get economically ahead in life. The rankings are broken down by region. (We used the same data and methodology to create the social mobility portion of the main rankings; the methodology is explained here.) 

No university in America was more heavily criticized this year than Columbia for coming down too hard—or not hard enough—on the Gaza protesters and for being too wishy-washy—or too doctrinaire—in defending free speech. But let us offer a rare good word for the Morningside Heights institution: It does right by its non-wealthy students. Columbia undergrads from families earning less than $75,000 annually pay only $3,061 a year to attend (including living expenses) and are making $89,697 in annual income nine years after entering the university. Columbia clocks in at number four on our Best Bang for the Buck Northeast ranking this year. 

That said, Columbia doesn’t serve that many low- and moderate-income students—out of a graduating class of 2,200, only 432 receive Pell Grants. By contrast, CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, number seven on our Northeast rankings, graduates 1,589 Pell students a year. Rutgers University–Newark, number 21, outranks Yale and Dartmouth, 27 and 35, respectively. And while Columbia’s low cost for non-wealthy students and high earnings are admirable, at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, number five in our Northeast rankings, students face total charges of $8,072, and earn more than $77,000 per year nine years out. Even with an endowment of just $40 million, the Massachusetts Maritime Academy does not drop a heavy anchor of debt on students. 

Across all of the regions, some of America’s wealthiest and most selective colleges perform admirably. MIT, Princeton, Vanderbilt, Georgetown, Stanford, and Northwestern all rank within the top 10 in their respective regions. But if anyone can provide high-quality, affordable educations to students from lower- and middle-income families, it is them. Because of their vast endowments—the result of decades of recruiting students from affluent families who go on to earn big bucks and then gratefully donate some back to their alma maters while enjoying tax deductions—these elite schools can afford to be generous to the relatively few poor students they recruit. 

Much more credit should go to the regionally focused public and private universities on this list that consistently manage to do more with less. The California State University system always stands out for its top performance, as seven of the top nine and 13 of the top 20 universities in the West are from that system. Berea College and the University of Texas–Rio Grande Valley lead the way in the South and the University of Florida Online and Florida International University are tops in the Southeast. In the Midwest, Governors State University, Trine University, and the College of the Ozarks are some of the broad-access institutions that keep prices in check while generating strong outcomes.

The Best Bang for the Buck colleges in every region are a mix of a few highly selective, nationally renowned colleges and lots of not-so-famous ones that serve a broader range of students. The same is true of the worst Bang for the Buck colleges, which you can view on our website by scrolling to the bottom of the rankings. There, you’ll probably recognize the names of  schools in your local community—regional public universities, small liberal arts colleges, for-profit outfits—that charge students more than they should, graduate fewer than they could, and deliver degrees that aren’t worth much in the marketplace. 

But what should really set you off—it certainly does us—are the schools that fail to serve lower-income students despite having all the resources they need to serve them well. Tulane University, for instance, has an endowment in excess of $2 billion, the 68th largest in the country. Yet it checks in at last place in the South this year due to relatively poor graduation rates, low post-college earnings, and a high net price. Other low-ranked universities with substantial financial resources include the University of Miami, High Point University, Creighton University, and the University of Tulsa. 

As these examples show, having a name brand is no guarantee that a college is doing right by low- and moderate-income students. Indeed, colleges that are little known outside of their local area—like the University of Houston–Downtown, or Towson University, or Metropolitan State in Minneapolis—are the ones doing the best job of moving the most people up the economic ladder. If you’re a prospective student from a family without a lot of money, we’re confident that any of the schools in the top third of our Best Bang for the Buck rankings would be good places to invest your time and tuition dollars. And if you’re a concerned citizen or policy maker, we’d like to suggest that the colleges at the bottom of these rankings might not be the best places to be spending our tax dollars.

The post America’s Best Bang for the Buck Colleges appeared first on Washington Monthly.

If you’re reading this, you probably remember the utter shock you felt on Election Night 2016, when it became apparent that Donald Trump was going to win. What may be harder to imagine today is that in the liberal world, the shock level was almost that high on Election Night 1980, when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter. In retrospect, that was the dawn of the historically inevitable Age of Reagan; in the moment, Reagan’s victory contravened liberals’ long-held conviction that the conservative wing of the Republican Party was marginal, not central, in American politics. In 2024, with our political system deeply polarized, low functioning, and apparently unable to bring the country together to solve problems and build a better life for ordinary Americans, it’s tempting to search for an origin story. What was the fateful wrong turn? And one place one might find it is the 1980s, when the benefits of economic growth started to skew toward the affluent and the tone of mainstream politics became more combative.

Economists, sociologists, and political scientists have produced a small library’s worth of books about this; now we have two books by culturally oriented journalists, looking in unexpected places for the answer to the great mystery. For academics, this might be called a search for an independent variable, and they would be expected to test each possibility rigorously against others. Journalists get to be more fanciful, and perhaps to have more fun. So it is with these books, which in effect offer two quite different independent variables that might help us understand how we got here. In Steven Hyden’s There Was Nothing You Could Do, it’s the release and reception of Bruce Springsteen’s 1984 album Born in the U.S.A.; in Tom McGrath’s Triumph of the Yuppies, it’s the rise and fall of a much-discussed cultural type of that era.

Perhaps you’re too young for either of these to ring a bell, so let’s start with a little history. Springsteen became famous with his 1975 album Born to Run and his long, electrifying live performances, but then he brought out three albums that seemed to represent a deliberate retreat from the spotlight—particularly the third of the three, Nebraska (1982), a collection of Woody Guthrie–like slow, sad stories recorded without a backup band. Then, boom, came Born in the U.S.A., which was loud, arena friendly, and packaged, back when album covers were a thing, in echt-American iconography: Springsteen in blue jeans and a white T-shirt, in front of an American flag. Yuppies was a term popularized by the Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene, as shorthand for “young urban professionals.” The emergence of the yuppie as a social type was notable, because it went against two previous prevailing pop culture narratives: first, that the Baby Boom generation was centrally defined by idealism, even protest (yuppies were materialistic and drawn to business careers); and second, that affluent, educated people, as they entered their thirties, would move to the suburbs and start families (yuppies gentrified city neighborhoods, went to restaurants and fitness clubs, and put off marriage).

For liberals, what might be most disturbing about the politics of the moment is that they are losing the loyalty and trust of the Americans they think of as their natural allies, those who are not prospering. The Republican Party has been successfully wooing voters in left-behind places, voters who didn’t go to college, voters with precarious jobs, even (starting from a low baseline) minority voters. Awareness of this phenomenon hovers in the background of both these books. Bruce Springsteen’s songs are deeply rooted in working-class, nonmetropolitan life, and he attracts an audience that crosses cultural and political divides even though his own politics seem to be left-populist. Could studying him closely reveal something that liberalism could use to reverse its fortunes? Yuppies, on the other hand, were widely despised, as symbols of a kind of self-regarding elite liberalism that alienates everybody else. Could everything that has gone wrong be their fault?

McGrath devotes a good deal of Triumph of the Yuppies to describing large changes in the basic organization of the American economy. As he points out, median family income doubled between 1940 and 1970, then stalled. The advent of NAFTA and other free trade agreements caused devastating declines in manufacturing employment, and more broadly in the economies of midwestern industrial states. The American corporate welfare state that took shape in the 1950s, offering generous health care, pensions, and job security, deteriorated severely thanks to a new, Wall Street–oriented version of corporate capitalism personified by Jack Welch of General Electric, the most admired CEO of the late twentieth century. A newly empowered financial sector, personified in McGrath’s book by Michael Milken of Drexel Burnham Lambert, aggressively rearranged assets in ways that contributed to inequality and dislocation. When Reagan ran for president, he tapped into the economic discontent Americans were feeling—“I regret to say that we’re in the worst economic mess since the Great Depression,” he said in a televised address shortly after taking office—but his remedies, tax cuts and deregulation, did not make life better for the working class.

None of this was part of the official story of the yuppies, which focused closely on them and what at the time seemed to be peculiar cultural tastes. Why did they prefer to pay good money for Grey Poupon mustard (instead of French’s), Perrier water (instead of tap water), and Häagen-Dazs ice cream (instead of Baskin-Robbins)? Why did they seem to be preoccupied with the price of real estate, above all other economic issues? Why did they see careers on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley as somehow exemplifying the spirit of the 1960s? The way McGrath has chosen to frame his book dictates that he cover all these questions extensively, but they come across more as effects than causes—of the generally more materialistic ethos that the unrestrained capitalism of the era engendered, and of the yuppies’ wish to improve their standard of living in minor symbolic ways when the overall tide was running against most of them, let alone people who weren’t urban professionals. Yuppies were neither numerous nor powerful enough to have been the authors of the new American economy. Their larger political effect was probably greater for the people they alienated—those who didn’t share their metropolitan, secular, culturally liberal sensibilities—than for whatever social arrangements they put in place.

Hyden is less interested in political economy than McGrath, and also a less didactic writer. If you have been following Springsteen’s current world tour, in which, on the verge of his 75th birthday, he’s still going strong (though he has to take a break when an ailment strikes), he seems like an eternal figure. The core of his band is made up of musicians he began playing with half a century ago in central New Jersey clubs, and the set list is heavily weighted toward familiar hits that originally appeared on his early albums. Hyden has a charmingly digressive writing voice that gives him plenty of room to remind us that Springsteen’s career has had more phases than we might remember. There were periods when he dismissed his band. There were his unlikely creative alliances with people like the film director Paul Schrader and the angry Vietnam War veteran Ron Kovic. There were stretches when, at least judged by his album sales, Springsteen was a faded star, or at least not an artist with broad appeal; he was outsold by other purveyors of heartland rock like Bob Seger, Bon Jovi, and Tom Petty when they were in their prime.

One has to tease out Hyden’s main point from all his interesting ruminations and side trips, but here’s what I think it is. Born in the U.S.A., usually seen as a turn toward the commercial and celebratory imposed on Springsteen by his producer-manager, Jon Landau, was actually a brilliant and hard-to-replicate straddle of the American cultural divides that were emerging in the 1980s. Yes, the title song was hearable as a patriotic anthem, as it famously was by the conservative columnist George Will (who praised a Springsteen performance he had attended for displaying “hard, honest work and evidence of the astonishing vitality of America’s regions and generations”), but it actually was a memorably bitter account of a Vietnam veteran’s unconscionable abandonment by his country after it had “Sent me off to a foreign land /To go and kill the yellow man.” Yes, the sound of the album was upbeat, but the content of the songs was right in line with the material on Nebraska. Yes, the best- known video version of a song from the album, “Dancing in the Dark,” was cheesy, but most of the other videos, directed by the indy filmmaker John Sayles, were not. Hyden himself, as a seven-year-old boy, was captivated by the album, even though most of the songs were about people who were roughly the same age as yuppies but whose lives had faded into despair after a brief late-adolescent paradise of sex and fast cars.

Springsteen in those days was neither purely mass nor purely elite. Most of his songs were about men, but women loved him. Most of his songs were about dead-end lives, but yuppies loved him. He was neither liberal nor conservative, neither Democrat nor Republican. (Hyden reminds us that Springsteen stubbornly refused to endorse Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign against Reagan in the year Born in the U.S.A. came out, although he did object forcefully to the Reagan campaign’s efforts to claim the album as an endorsement of Reaganism.) The cultural space that he had carved out doesn’t seem to exist anymore, possibly even for Springsteen himself. Hyden appears to disapprove of Springsteen’s 21st-century rebirth as a kind of national healer, whose songs have gone from, in his terms, descriptive to prescriptive. (Hyden identifies this trend as beginning with the post-9/11 album The Rising.) The Springsteen who appears at late-October rallies for Democratic presidential candidates, who made a Super Bowl ad for Jeep called “The Middle,” who recorded a podcast with Barack Obama and titled an episode “American Renewal,” is not the Springsteen Hyden fell in love with. He has gone from actually bridging divides to calling for bridging divides. And, on the other hand, the divide-bridging aspect of Born in the U.S.A. as a cultural artifact that Hyden admires did nothing to halt the onward march of inequality.

It’s eternally tempting for liberals to think that if they can find just the right cultural note to strike—in terms of these books, less yuppie, more peak Springsteen—then their natural constituents will come home, abandoning the sarcasm and resentment that politicians like Donald Trump offer as salve for their very real wounds. It has been a rarely successful quest. Even people who seem as if they can pull it off can lose their magic. Our national divisions are so deep and profound that one tiny misstep, involving an unconscious cultural slip that can be exploited by Fox News, can disable efforts to bridge them. For liberals it might be better, though harder and less emotionally satisfying, to make policies that will provide the great majority of Americans with the lives of security and opportunity that they long for, and then see if the cultural expressions will take care of themselves.

The post Can the 1980s Explain 2024? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On August 26, 1970, the 50th anniversary of women’s suffrage, an estimated 50,000 women marched down New York City’s Fifth Avenue as part of a daylong general strike. Betty Friedan, the author of the seminal work The Feminine Mystique, which had sparked the so-called second wave of feminism, had called for the strike as a way to cast media attention on the nascent women’s movement. She declared the day “a resistance both passive and active, of all women in America against the concrete conditions of their oppression.” Never one to shirk the spotlight, Friedan led the brigade, flanked by a gaggle of former suffragists, veterans of feminism’s first wave now in their 70s and 80s. Women chanted, held signs, and cheered, “Liberté, égalité, sororité,” “Don’t iron while the strike is hot,” and “Uppity women unite.”

The city permit restricted the march to a single lane of traffic, but the teeming crowd soon flooded the street. Friedan instructed protesters to “Lock arms, sidewalk to sidewalk!” “I never saw so many women; they stretched back for so many blocks you couldn’t see the end,” she recalled. “There were so many of us they couldn’t stop us; they didn’t even try.”

Friedan’s group, the National Organization of Women, had coordinated the strike, but dozens of disparate organizations gathered under NOW’s tattered umbrella, including the radical Redstockings, the Professional Women’s Caucus, the National Coalition of American Nuns, Black Women’s Liberation, the lesbian group Daughters of Bilitis, and the League of Women Voters. Friedan had originally conceived of NOW as a civil rights organization, essentially an “NAACP for women,” working incrementally within existing legal and governmental structures to expand women’s access to jobs, equal pay, financial tools like mortgages and credit cards, and access to single-sex institutions. But in recent years, younger, more radical women had joined the movement. Many were alumnae of the civil rights, antiwar, and youth movements who brought with them new, more confrontational tactics including guerilla actions and a broader vision for feminism, one that critiqued traditional families and gender hierarchies and embraced sexual freedom.

But on the day of the strike, such differences were cast aside. Time magazine—which featured the event on its cover—described the movement as “diffuse, divided, but grimly determined.” Nearly everyone involved viewed it as a watershed event. Mary Jean Collins, the president of Chicago NOW, recalled, “It was the best idea ever in the history of the world, because it doubled the size of the women’s movement.” Friedan boasted, “On August 26, it suddenly became both political and glamorous to be a feminist.”

This watershed moment of unity is recounted at length in Clara Bingham’s The Movement, a compulsively readable oral history and a timely addition to the historical literature. The Movement spans the first 10 years of second-wave feminism, bookended by the publication of Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion.

Bingham’s title—The Movement—might more accurately include a pair of air quotes, because the singular women’s movement was, in fact, an amalgam of dozens of distinct factions with varied demographics, beliefs, and goals—a diversity vividly on display at the 1970 strike. Writing for The Village Voice, the journalist Vivian Gornick summarized the movement as “running the entire political spectrum from conservative reform to visionary radicalism, and powered by an emotional conviction rooted in undeniable experience, and fed by a determination that is irreversible.”

As is typical of oral histories, The Movement incorporates minimal expository or analytical text, relying instead on the voices of the interviewees and news clippings to create a narrative. Bingham places her subjects in conversation with each other, documentary style. The effect is utterly engrossing. It is easy to forget that Bingham’s subjects are women in their 70s and 80s recalling events from more than a half century ago. The most riveting interviews are those that divulge intimate, even womanly, details, like the political operative Esther Newberg’s recollection of her job interview with Bella Abzug while the New York congresswoman changed outfits, shimmying into an old-fashioned girdle. Or the vivid recollections of Judith Arcana, an unlicensed medical practitioner and young mother who expressed her own breast milk into a filthy jailhouse sink after her arrest for performing illegal abortions.

Not surprisingly, The Movement includes all the principal architects of second-wave feminism. Bingham intertwines her own interviews with celebrated leaders like Gloria Steinem and Susan Brownmiller with archive-sourced commentary from deceased luminaries like Friedan, Abzug, and Shirley Chisholm. But delightfully, the great majority of Bingham’s 120 interviewees will be unfamiliar to the average reader. These interviews make The Movement sparkle, and include congressional staffers, flight attendants, artists, athletes, office workers, labor organizers, academics, plaintiffs in precedent-setting court cases, and the “Janes,” an underground network of women who trained one another to perform abortions.

Each speaker is introduced simply by name, with no title or description, although the reader can find short bios at the back of the book. More than just an editorial quirk, this democratization of voices serves as a metaphor for a movement that challenged traditional male power hierarchies and favored collective action and decision-making. Rita Mae Brown, an author and radical lesbian activist, once famously proclaimed, “We don’t need spokespeople and we don’t need leaders. All women can speak, and all women can write.” Indeed, in Bingham’s telling, all voices carry an equal weight. Bingham’s inclusion of lesser-known actors effectively evokes a largely grassroots movement that included thousands of activists in a vast array of professional fields, along with the millions fighting gender battles on the home front.

Mindful of the persistent critique that the most celebrated leaders of the women’s movement represented the interests of educated, straight, middle-class white women at the expense of working-class women, women of color, and lesbians—a refrain ever since Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique essentially ignored all questions of class, race, and sexual preference—Bingham has worked hard to rebalance the historical record. Bingham’s inclusion of a greater range of voices is not some dutiful box-ticking exercise in political correctness: She is offering up a richer, more accurate encapsulation of the movement than most prior histories.

To do so, Bingham places government bureaucrats committed to enforcement of Title VII side by side with counterculture hippies exploring the boundaries of sexual freedom and deftly explores Black women’s complicated relationship with the women’s movement. For many Black women, the concerns of the women’s movement felt less pressing than civil rights. Barbara Smith, a writer and early founder of Black women’s studies as an academic discipline, recalled of the movement’s early days: “I could not even wrap my mind around [women’s liberation] because, it’s like, white women? What do white women have to complain about?” Smith later became an early member of the National Black Feminist Organization, which spoke to issues of both racial and gender inequality. For others, misogyny in the Black Power movement awakened their feminism. “The men were having a revolution that was not going to include us except in a subsidiary, docile, baby-having way,” the cultural critic Michele Wallace recalled. “That’s when I became a feminist.”

With so many competing agendas and diverse voices, the women’s movement was famously quarrelsome. Bingham gamely wades into the messy brew of personal attacks, factionalism, and intra-movement politics. Marilyn Webb, the cofounder of the first women’s consciousness-raising group in Chicago, recalled the collective eye roll by her fellow younger activists over the relatively modest ambitions of Friedan’s generation. “The women in NOW essentially accepted the patriarchy,” she told Bingham. “We wanted to talk about how their roles are defined in marriage, family and social living, how women are treated as a colonized class.” NOW, comprised primarily of middle-aged, professional women, likewise labeled the theatrical tactics of younger, radical activists—like crowning a sheep “Miss America”—“a little nutsy.”

Indeed, at the 1970 “Congress to Unite Women”—which Brownmiller wryly dubbed “the Congress to Divide Women”—NOW nearly combusted over its public embrace of lesbians, who Friedan famously termed the “lavender menace.” Looking back, some interviewees saw the conflict as inevitable. “A certain amount of cannibalizing seems to go with the territory whenever activists gather to promote social change,” Brownmiller reflected. Bingham goes further, seemingly celebrating the competing interest groups as a sign of breadth, diversity, and ideological vigor in the movement. Gornick wrote cheekily in The Village Voice, “If five feminists fall out with six groups within half an hour they’ll all find each other … within 48 hours a new splinter faction will have announced its existence, and within two weeks the manifesto is being mailed out. It’s the mark of a true movement.”

Not surprisingly, for a movement that gave birth to the phrase “The personal is political,” many women were spurred to activism by events in their own lives. Bingham includes confessional stories of how interviewees’ personal journeys—an illegal abortion, a denied promotion, a rape —led them to the movement. Sally Roesch Wagner, who later founded one of the nation’s first women’s studies programs, recalled being forced to forego college as a pregnant teenager. “I was literally transferred from my father to my husband,” she told Bingham. “I wept because all my possibilities were gone.”

Some events, like the fight for the equal rights amendment, Billie Jean King’s “Battle of the Sexes,” and the founding of Ms. magazine, have been well documented elsewhere, although they are much enriched by Bingham’s oral history. But there are plenty of lesser-known stories, too, like that of Bobbi Gibb, the first woman to run the Boston Marathon, in 1966. After her registration form was rejected, Gibb ran anyway, disguised in a hooded sweatshirt. As she raced past onlookers at Wellesley, a woman’s college, she cast off the sweatshirt to applause and cheers. “They just went crazy. They were crying and leaping in the air and screaming. And one woman was going, ‘Ave Maria, Ave Maria,’” Gibbs recalled. “I really felt at that moment that the world would never be the same again.”

The Movement’s tone is triumphant, and Bingham’s interviewees understandably bask in the glow of victory. In 1973, the FBI officially closed its files on the women’s liberation movement, a remarkable admission that its essential principles, once perceived as radical and threatening, had become mainstream. It is a testament to the enduring success of the movement that it’s almost impossible for a young woman today to imagine a world in which whole career paths were inaccessible, women couldn’t apply for a mortgage or credit card without their husband or father’s signature, and an unmarried woman could not get a prescription for birth control. Today, women represent the majority of students receiving undergraduate, law, and medical degrees. The legalization of gay marriage and broad recognition of LGBTQ rights reflect a revolutionary transformation in the acceptance of nontraditional families. A quarter century after the passage of Title IX, women’s athletic scholarships now add up to more than $200 million, and for the first time this year, the NCAA women’s basketball championship game attracted more viewers than the men’s.

Yet it’s impossible to read this book today without reflecting on how one of the movement’s crowning achievements—the right to abortion access—was overturned in 2022 and on how Republican-led state governments have criminalized abortion care in the wake of the decision. Bingham and her interviewees mostly refrain from weighing in on our current state of affairs—this is a history book with a narrow focus on a particular decade. But one of the lessons of The Movement is that the tenets of feminism suffused and reconstituted American culture so completely that its right-wing opponents today are fighting a deeply unpopular battle. Conservatives paid a heavy political price in the 2022 midterms for attacking reproductive rights—though what happens to those and other rights after the November elections remains to be seen. The era that The Movement documents “was not just political or legal, social or cultural disruption—it was all that and more,” Bingham writes. “It was a bedroom and a boardroom and an assembly-line revolution—a restructuring of how women and men in America saw each other, a reinvention of roles and a fundamental identity shift.” That fundamental identity shift endures, and the weight of history may be against those who want to reverse it.

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