To see our 2015 Best-Bang-for-the-Buck rankings click here.

This is the fourth year in a row we’ve produced a set of rankings that rewards colleges that do a good job of conferring degrees on lower- and middle-income students while charging them reasonable prices. This “Best Bang for the Buck” measure has evolved over time, from an article highlighting a small number of colleges with great outcomes in the first year to a stand-alone list of several hundred colleges performing well on access, affordability, and completion metrics.

The national discussion about college value has also changed. Two years ago, President Barack Obama was vowing to rate the nation’s colleges and universities based on metrics very similar to our Best Bang for the Buck rankings. Earlier this summer, however, the administration raised the white flag after bitter protests from the college lobbying community and threats from Congress to defund the endeavor. It now says it will merely provide more and better data and let private outfits do the grading. This means that if you want to know which colleges in America provide the best value for ordinary, non-wealthy students, the Washington Monthly is the only game in town!

We’ll incorporate the government’s new data, if it’s valuable, into future rankings. But we’re not standing still this year. For a new book we just published, The Other College Guide: A Roadmap to the Right School for You (New Press), we’ve revised our Best Bang for the Buck rankings to include all four-year colleges covered in our regular rankings, not just the few hundred top ones. To do so, we changed our methodology slightly (a detailed methodology can be found here). Instead of creating a short list of schools that met our minimum performance standards (on student loan default rate, graduation rate, graduation rate performance, and the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants) and then ranking those schools by their net price of attendance (how much students pay for college after grants and scholarships), we ranked all colleges by those performance criteria and then considered net price. We’ve also grouped colleges by region to make the rankings easier for students to use—80 percent of students choose colleges near where they live. You can see the rankings here.

The first thing you’ll notice is that the top-ranked colleges within each region (College of the Ozarks, the City University of New York’s Bernard Baruch College, Berea College in Kentucky, East Carolina University in North Carolina, and the University of Washington’s main Seattle campus) are a mix of household names and relatively unknown institutions. But the stories behind these colleges and their strong performances are fascinating. For example, Berea College primarily serves students from low-income families and does not charge tuition, thanks to a large endowment and generous donors, resulting in a negative net price for the neediest students and a 64 percent graduation rate. East Carolina University, however, relies on the state of North Carolina’s traditional strong support for higher education in order to keep tuition low. At East Carolina, nearly 60 percent of students graduate, 31 percent receive Pell Grants, and just 3 percent default on their loans. Berea and East Carolina are not found in the top fifty of the U.S. News rankings, but they are a great value for students who can gain admission.

While all of the colleges near the top of the list do a good job of serving a broad swath of the population at a reasonable price, this is not necessarily the case for colleges near the bottom of the list. Many University of Phoenix branch campuses show up near the bottom of the lists, and for good reason. Graduation rates are typically below 25 percent, one in six students default on their loans within two years of beginning repayment, and the net price per year is around $23,000. Although much of the for-profit college sector has faced scrutiny for poor outcomes and high prices, students should also be wary of some of the public and private nonprofit colleges with similarly poor outcomes.

Our exclusive list of schools that help non-wealthy students attain marketable degrees at affordable prices.

The post America’s Best Bang for the Buck Colleges 2015 appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In the divisive, partisan political debates in D.C., the term “grand bargain” refers to a deal in which each side gives up a dearly held position to get what they want. Democrats accept entitlement cuts, for example, while Republicans accept a tax hike.

In a recent article in these pages (“Can Gay Wedlock Break Political Gridlock?,” March/April/May 2015), David Blankenhorn, William Galston, Jonathan Rauch, and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead suggested that conservatives and progressives forge such a grand bargain regarding marriage. In this scenario, conservatives would accept same-sex marriage and progressives would accept the compelling research that married families are better for child outcomes than single parents.

I found their reasoning and evidence strong, and their case well argued. But the bargain they offered was weak then and it’s even weaker now, since the Supreme Court has made same-sex marriage allowable across the country. Certainly it would be better for a pluralistic America if conservatives accepted gay marriage—but, especially since younger generations already do so, regardless of their politics, I’m not sure it matters that much. That train has left the station, with Justice Kennedy at the controls. While it’s possible that future courts could reverse the decision, it’s unlikely.

So I’m here to offer a stronger version of a grand bargain. Progressives should accept that there’s a link between family structure and childhood outcomes. (I’ll go through the research below, as the findings are more nuanced and open to interpretation than this language makes it sound.) But since it’s no sacrifice for conservatives to accept something that’s already solidly in place, here’s their part of the new grand bargain: in the interest of promoting more lasting marriages and stable families, they must accept the policy interventions that will provide more economic opportunity to families, including children, their parents, and their potential parents. These interventions could involve employment and wage programs, universal health care coverage, quality pre-K, college tuition assistance, and incarceration reform.

The role of family structure in poverty, inequality, and child outcomes has been debated for decades, with progressives arguing that the increase in single parenthood is driven by economic forces, and conservatives arguing that prevailing cultural norms are to blame. While all this has been going on—and versions of this debate date back to the English Poor Laws of the early 1600s—researchers have been examining the impact that growing up outside of stable marriages has on children’s outcomes.

This now large body of research finds considerable evidence that children who grow up with two parents rather than one achieve better adult outcomes, at least on an “all-else-equal” basis (bad marriages, for example, are bad for kids). Some of this is also common sense: two incomes are greater than one, and two caregivers by definition have more time, arms, ears, and so on than one. While the research typically finds that family stability (that is, consistency in family structure) is particularly important for kids’ outcomes, it’s clear that married families are more likely to be stable than unmarried ones.

These observations—married families are less likely to be poor and unstable; there are advantages inherent in having multiple caretakers in a home—suggest to some that public policy should, in the interest of helping some of our least advantaged kids, try to reverse the “retreat from marriage.”

Fair enough, but it’s not that easy, and here, the very different progressive and conservative diagnoses matter a lot. First, the literature is not as unequivocal as many writers on this subject claim. For one, all else is in fact far from equal, and the choices facing single women who want to be parents are complicated in a number of ways. Second, to the extent that the changes in family structure are cultural, I think they are and will remain largely immune to public policy (and I won’t even get into the irony of conservatives and especially libertarians trying to employ policy to change culture and family structure).

Third—and here’s where the bargain comes in—policy really could make a difference if it invested in the well-being and upward mobility of kids in disadvantaged families, regardless of their family type. Moreover, if we also invest in their parents and potential parents, we may incentivize more marriages as well.

While this may make you yearn for the mythical one-handed economist, here’s how the sociologists Sara McLanahan and Christopher Jencks, highly reliable voices in this debate, summarize the research:

On the one hand, growing up without both biological parents is clearly associated with worse average outcomes for children than growing up with them. Specifically, children growing up with a single mother are exposed to more family instability and complexity, they have more behavior problems, and they are less likely to finish high school or attend college than children raised by both of their parents. On the other hand, these differences in children’s behavior and success might well be traceable to differences that would exist even if the biological father were present. 1

The problem in nailing down the impact of one versus two parents on children’s outcomes is that there are so many confounding factors that get in the way. Relative to two-parent families, single parents are more likely to be low income, reside in disadvantaged neighborhoods, and through that channel be exposed to deeply damaging environmental stimuli, including violence, poor and unsafe housing, and deficient public goods, from air quality to infrastructure to education. Such disadvantages obviously pose huge challenges to kids, regardless of their family structure.

The economist Raj Chetty’s highly touted work on neighborhood effects is instructive in this regard. When families with young children, including single-parent families, move from high- to low-poverty areas, the children’s adult outcomes are much improved along key dimensions including education and earnings, suggesting the dominance of environmental factors. Also, kids from neighborhoods with large shares of single parents have lower levels of intergenerational mobility, even for the children of married parents.

This latter finding could again suggest that neighborhood factors dampen children’s mobility, regardless of family type, as neighborhoods with a lot of single moms are just really tough places to raise kids. Or it could suggest a way in which single-parent families generate negative spillovers to married families, perhaps through behavioral channels.

One finding that shows up across numerous studies has to do with the negative behaviors of children raised by single parents. Growing up without a father significantly lowers a child’s chance of finishing high school, which is a huge disadvantage. However, these problems seem to have more to do with behavioral problems than weaker cognitive skills. Such behavioral problems tend to show up more in sons of single moms than daughters, and this may be a factor behind the increased gender gap in college completion, which McLanahan points out “is much more pronounced among children raised by single mothers than among children raised in two-parent families.”

These educational outcomes matter not just in the realm of later employment and earnings but also in the evolution of family structure itself, as the group of women who are least likely to be single moms are college graduates. That is, while the likelihood of being a single parent has increased for all education groups, the increases have been much larger for non-college-educated women.

Researchers have deployed statistical methods to try to determine causality, such as comparing siblings with different amounts of exposure to “father absence,” or using longitudinal data to measure changes in child well-being after a separation. While these methods all have limits and the causality debate is therefore far from resolved, the results from these more revealing methods tend to be similar (though often diminished in magnitude) to the findings described above, which suggests that there’s more than just correlation underlying these outcomes.

Still, at the end of the day, McLanahan and Jencks honestly conclude that “[t]hese findings do not mean that children would necessarily be better off if their biological parents were married.” All else simply isn’t equal, especially in this arena, where kids of unmarried moms are more likely than other children to have a father who is incarcerated and disconnected from the workforce. “Furthermore,” they write,

even when a child’s absent father is a model citizen, the mother often has problems that marriage cannot solve. Unmarried mothers have seldom done well in school, many lack even a high school diploma.… [I]f these mothers find work, their earnings are usually lower than those of married mothers who work, and their hours are often long, erratic, or both.… [T]rying to raise children alone on a tiny budget is likely to exacerbate whatever problems a mother had initially.… [M]arrying the man who fathered her child may magnify a mother’s problems rather than solve them.

These critical observations underscore the bargain I’m touting here. But first, what’s the role of culture in all of this, and isn’t there something we can do about that?

Before I can argue the dominance of the strong version of the grand bargain, I must try to deal with the claim, one which is surely partially correct, that culture and changing norms, not just economic opportunity, are a significant determinant of changes in family structure.

But just how significant? As the sociologist Kathryn Edin’s work has shown, many economically disadvantaged poor women are not willingly choosing single parenthood; many would prefer to form stable, two-parent families. One recent survey found, for example, that, “relative to higher income respondents, low-income respondents held more traditional values toward marriage, had similar romantic standards for marriage, and experienced similar skills-based relationship problems.”

We’d expect the opposite to be true if culture and norms were the major drivers behind these trends. I suspect that what’s really happening here is that, due to diminished economic opportunity and incarceration policy, low-income, non-college-educated women face both more constrained choices regarding marriage partners (the economic part), and less constrained choices regarding whether that means they can’t have families (the norms part).

Social conservatives argue that the expanded choices facing women are born less of devaluing marriage and more of the absence of stigma associated with out-of-wedlock childbearing and divorce. As recently as the 1960s, they argue, men and women wanting a regular sex life, a long-term romantic relationship, and, indeed, children, had to marry or face ostracism (or at least judgment) by the predominant culture. Another contributing factor, according to conservative culturistas, is the normalization of contraception and abortion to the point that childbearing is seen not as a joint decision by the child’s parents but as the woman’s choice, in turn relieving societal pressure on their male partners to marry.

They may be onto something, but I’m not so sure. The distinction between devaluing marriage and destigmatizing single parenthood seems to me to be one without much of a difference; the Edin research seems to contradict the notion that greater reproductive choice has led men to feel less responsible for children they father.

Moreover, there are ways in which alleged cultural changes interact with economic outcomes that cannot be meaningfully untangled. Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, references another shift that he argues is pushing against marriage: “the erosion of a kind of working-class prosocial masculinity connected to providership.” He suggests that the routine of providing for a family historically played a disciplining and self-affirming role in men’s lives. But as gainful work has become more scarce for working-class (i.e., non-college-educated) men, the discipline and affirmation has eroded, with negative effects on marriage rates.

I have no idea whether that’s true in a cultural sense (that is, whether working-class men lack some dimension of masculinity that they used to possess), though it sounds squishy, if not fishy. But I agree that diminished access to steady jobs that pay living wages has been a larger problem for men than women, due in no small part to industry shifts from manufacturing to services. (Decades of large trade deficits have exacerbated this problem.) What’s interesting about this formulation is that if it’s true, it illustrates how culture and economic trends are inextricably wound up together. It also implies, in sync with McLanahan and the sociologist William J. Wilson, that better job opportunities might help ameliorate the allegedly eroded norm.

Similarly, increased gender equality is both a cultural and an economic phenomenon, as feminism strives to increase both choices and opportunities for women, in part through fights for pay equity and occupational desegregation. While this is surely a positive development, conservatives worry that the rising cultural norm of female economic independence reduces social pressure on men to support them. Again, even if that were true, it’s hard for me—as I suspect it would be for most conservatives—to imagine an ethical, cogent argument that suggests women give back their (incomplete) gains in this economic space so that men will feel more responsible for the children they father.

Our attitudes and policies toward crime and incarceration are also having devastating effects on the economic prospects of generations of mostly male and disproportionately minority Americans. This aspect of our culture is clearly reducing marriage rates as well, as many women recognize the instability and economic volatility that our criminal justice system wreaks on many of their potential partners.

Many of us may well bemoan the decoupling of marriage and parenthood, but the fact is that it has occurred largely as the result of a broad spate of choices and economic realities facing women. The ability of government to change alleged attitudes about masculinity, to push back on gender independence, or to reconnect the fraying norm that children should be born to married couples is almost surely severely constrained by the limits of public policy. (To be fair, Wilcox and many others who advocate this side of the “grand bargain” believe that it is the work of “civic, religious, and cultural” leaders and institutions, not government.) And even if policy could “put that toothpaste back in the tube,” at least one dimension of this norm—our progress on gender equality—is a clear positive.

The punchline of all this is, to the extent that children in single-parent families suffer from diminished educational and economic opportunities available to both their mothers and their mothers’ potential partners, there is a rich policy agenda that should be brought to bear, and it is here that the new grand bargain exists.

When it comes to families, the best way forward is to celebrate the diversity of American family structure, including gay families, single-parent families, multigenerational families, stepfamilies, and so on. We must strive for family stability and opportunity for kids in each of these family types, which depends on policies that help their parents as well. That implies far-reaching policy changes, including in the realms of criminal justice and incarceration, health care, full employment, work supports, housing, and educational access.

In fact, when gainful job opportunities are robust, and work supports, notably child care, wage subsidies, health coverage, and an ample minimum wage, are in place, single parents’ earnings rise and their poverty rate falls. As the figure on page 18 reveals, the last time the U.S. economy was at truly full employment, the employment rates of less-educated single mothers shot up, surpassing those of married moms. Of course, these were the years of work-based welfare reform, targeted precisely at moving this population into work, but as best we can tell, that’s only part of the story, explaining maybe a third of the increase. We also had a minimum wage increase, a significant increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit (a wage subsidy for low-wage workers), expanded child care subsidies, and the tightest labor market in decades, before or since. In fact, the figure shows that as the economy tailed off, employment rates for married and single women, including those without kids, all followed the same downward trend (and, of course, welfare reform was still in place in those years, so it can’t be the whole story).

We can argue culture all we want, but if we really want to help mother-only families, especially in our current era, when antipoverty policy is increasingly oriented around work, we’ve got to help them, their children’s fathers, and their potential future mates find good jobs with ample work supports. Other countries have learned this lesson and have lower child poverty rates among single-parent families than we have among married-parent families in the United States. This suggests an agenda including full employment, earn-while-you-learn apprenticeship programs, robust wage subsidies, universal health coverage, housing and child care supports, quality pre-K, college affordability, and a fairer, less punitive criminal justice system.

With this agenda in place, some single parents might well consider marriage and some women who are considering an unmarried birth might reconsider. We don’t have a ton of data on this point, but it is true that the unmarried birth rate flattened somewhat in the full-employment 1990s. And virtually every family sociologist who studies this issue argues that better opportunities for potential marriage partners will make a positive difference in marriage rates, and, ultimately, in kids’ well-being in both the short and long term. Either way, with this agenda in place we can be sure that families of all types and their kids would be better off. That should be our primary policy goal, and, at least to me, it sounds like a pretty grand bargain.

David Blankenhorn, William Galston, Jonathan Rauch, and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead respond:

As lead authors of the report Marriage Opportunity: The Moment for National Action, recently featured in these pages, we’re grateful to Jared Bernstein for his thoughtful response and for his proposals aimed at continuing and deepening the discussion. To most of what Bernstein says, our response is: Amen, and Amen.

Bernstein says that gay marriage is a done deal—“That train,” he writes, “has left the station.” We agree. He says that a large body of research suggests that family structure matters and that stable, married-couple homes offer significant advantages to children. We agree. Regarding the question of what’s causing the weakening of family structure in non-affluent America, he argues in some detail that “cultural changes interact with economic outcomes” in ways that “cannot meaningfully be untangled.” We agree. He also insists that family structure effects inevitably overlap with—cannot meaningfully be fully separated from—neighborhood effects, incarceration effects, and other environmental influences. We agree.

In the best traditions of progressive thought, he makes the case for policies aimed at increasing income and enhancing economic security for less-well-off Americans. He wants tight labor markets, wage subsidies, work supports such as child care, health coverage, an ample minimum wage, earn-while-you-learn apprenticeship programs, quality pre-K, college affordability, and a fairer, less punitive criminal justice system aimed at moving us away from a regime of mass incarceration.

On each of these proposals, of course, the devil is likely to be in the details, with conservatives and liberals bringing different perspectives to bear on them. But overall, we strongly support the thrust of what Bernstein is saying. For it seems clear that behind all of his proposals is the proposition that successfully using tools of public policy to improve economic well-being and opportunity for the bottom 70 percent or so of American workers is likely to contribute significantly to stronger families and a stronger marriage culture. We agree with this proposition. We don’t believe that policies such as these constitute the entirety of a fresh new pro-family agenda in America—and for all we know, neither does Jared Bernstein—but we recognize their importance as a part of that agenda and concur with Bernstein about the clear need for this way of thinking about helping families.

We only have a few nits to pick with Bernstein. Our main complaint is that, often in his essay, he seems to want to pick a fight with “conservative” ideas that in our view exist more in his head (or perhaps his memory) than in the actual public debates of 2015. For example, he states his disagreement with conservatives who want to “push back on gender independence” and who would “put the toothpaste back in the tube” on issues of gender equality. We’re not sure who he’s quarreling with anymore. Certainly not us—and a great many prominent conservative leaders and scholars signed on to the Marriage Opportunity report, which Bernstein uses as the starting point for his analysis. In fact, as the main organizers of the statement, we can report that not a single self-identified conservative with whom we spoke voiced any desire to “push back,” directly or indirectly, on female independence or gender equality. We ain’t your 1980s conservatives.

Bernstein also seems to be worried that, while progressives like him are open to economic policies aimed at strengthening families and expanding marriage opportunity, conservatives care only—or at least mainly— about trying to re-traditionalize cultural values. This concern of progressives used to have validity. Today, it has very little. In fact, a major shift in social-conservative thinking on the family in recent years has been its growing embrace of the proposition that, while culture clearly matters, so does economics. As a result we could say in our report, summarizing a fairly lengthy discussion of this very question, “The clear implication is that both economic and cultural opportunity need attending to. Structures and values both matter at the level of intervention, whatever their relative importance as original causes of
the predicament.”

Finally, Bernstein suggests that our report was the result of what he terms a “grand bargain,” in which “each side gives up a dearly held position to get what they want.” We can report unequivocally that this kind of bargaining is not what happened in our report. We did not ask or expect anyone to trade something in order to get something, and, to the best of our knowledge, no one did. It’s true that in our statement, as in any statement of this nature, each signatory had her or his particular concerns and particular contributions to make. Think of us as more an ensemble than a chorus. But all of us who signed the statement did so because it reflects our actual thinking about the topic. We didn’t do any deals.

Efforts to improve marriage opportunity in America are unlikely to succeed without the strong participation and support of progressives, and for this reason as well as others, we welcome and appreciate Bernstein’s contribution. We hope and believe that, insofar as Bernstein and other progressive intellectuals want to play a role in creating a new, inclusive pro-family and pro-marriage movement in America, they won’t have to kick down the door. The door is already wide open.

1. Some research challenges the inclusion of “biological” parents in this assessment, as outcomes for children of adoptive parents are often the same- an observation that will become more important as increased numbers of gay couples marry and have children.

The post Can Gay Wedlock Break Political Gridlock?: A Debate appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Higher education is going to be one of the sleeper issues of the 2016 campaign season. The reason is that voters are furious at rising tuition, particularly at public colleges and universities, where most students go. Millennials—who overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and are a must-win demographic for Democrats in 2016—are especially angry. Not surprisingly, Democratic presidential contenders are out front on the issue. Both Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley have released proposals for “debt-free college” at public universities, and word is that Hillary Clinton will follow suit. Republicans will at some point be forced to respond with ideas of their own.

The emergence of rising college tuition as a campaign issue will come as no surprise to longtime readers of the Washington Monthly. Ever since we first started publishing our alternative college rankings a decade ago, we’ve been arguing that America’s higher education system is headed for a reckoning—that its costs are unsustainable, that it lacks useful measures of quality, that it is grossly biased toward wealthy students, and that the dominant ranking system, provided by U.S. News & World Report, just makes things worse.

In this issue of the magazine, we offer our updated rankings for 2015, plus a fleet of stories that have a common theme, laid out in the introductory essay. To wit: the only way to lower college costs and improve quality is for the federal government, which covers a big chunk of the higher education sector’s budget, to be a more aggressive (and competent) regulator of the sector. Indeed, none of the Democrats’ “debt-free college” proposals will work without that. Read our coverage, and you’ll have a jump start on what will be a major campaign issue.

The lunch fast club

Washington journalists, at least those of a certain age, still work sources over lunch. I do too, on occasion. But the truth is, I’ve never really gotten into the whole Washington lunch scene. Part of the reason is cost. D.C. restaurants price their menus based on what the expense accounts of lobbying firms will bear, not those of small, low-budget magazines. But part of it is the peculiar rhythm of my appetite. I’m an early-to-rise guy, usually up by 6 a.m., and while I know I should have breakfast I don’t because I’m just not hungry. By midmorning, I’m ravenous. If I wait until noon or later to eat I get lightheaded. But asking someone to meet me for lunch at, say, 10:45 a.m. would be considered completely weird. So around that time I’m usually sitting by myself at Chipotle wolfing down a burrito bowl.

I wonder, though, if I’m really some kind of freak or just part of an untapped market. Ten percent of Americans skip breakfast, according to a 2011 survey. That suggests that there’s a substantial fraction of Washingtonians whose stomachs are growling by midmorning but who are too embarrassed to admit it, and hence don’t know that others are in the same boat. Maybe someone ought to design an app to help people like us find each other. Or maybe what’s needed is for a few innovative D.C. restaurateurs to make early lunch a “thing,” like brunch is, with a catchy name—“lunchfast”?—and half-price early-bird specials to fill otherwise empty tables. That sure would suit my stomach—and my budget.

The scandalization of bravery

Why are conservatives so obsessed with Benghazi? The conventional view is that they see it as a great weapon against Hillary Clinton, and that’s certainly true. Seven bipartisan inquiries, including one by the GOP-controlled House Intelligence Committee, have together debunked every single accusation that there was some kind of scandal associated with the attacks that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other U.S. staff members in Libya in 2012—for instance, that the administration issued a “stand down” order that kept U.S. military from sending in a rescue team. Yet an eighth investigation, by the Select Committee on Benghazi, grinds on.

In June, the committee spent a day grilling the journalist and former Clinton White House aide Sidney Blumenthal. The purported subject of the hearing was a series of emails about Benghazi that Blumenthal sent to Hillary Clinton, a personal friend, when she was secretary of state. The committee session quickly devolved into a political fishing expedition, with Republicans posing more than 160 questions about Blumenthal’s relationship and communications with the Clintons, more than fifty about the Clinton Foundation, and only four about security in Benghazi. The committee looks also to be the source behind the New York Times’ catastrophically inaccurate front-page story in July alleging a criminal referral to the Department of Justice about Clinton and her emails. The committee’s leader, Republican Representative Trey Gowdy, has said that the committee’s report won’t be completed until (surprise, surprise) 2016, in the middle of the presidential race. In the rich history of Washington scandal mongering, we have seen few investigations more cynical and nihilistic than this one.

Still, I don’t think naked political expediency sufficiently explains the bottomless well of outrage that Benghazi has stirred up among base Republican voters. To understand that, I think you have to go back to the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. Those who lived through that era can recall not just the nail-biting drama of those 444 days but also the sense of national effrontery—Ted Koppel’s famous nightly ABC News show about the crisis was tellingly entitled America Held Hostage.

The hostage crisis had three lasting effects. First, because it happened on Jimmy Carter’s watch, in the midst of a presidential race, and ended at the very moment Ronald Reagan was sworn into office, the crisis validated Republicans’ inner sense that they and only they could be trusted to protect America’s security. Second, the crisis turned the general subject of the safety of U.S. diplomats into a political and ideological issue in a way it never had been. In the eleven years prior to the hostage crisis, five U.S. ambassadors were murdered by militants and terrorists in places like Lebanon, Guatemala, and the Sudan. None of those losses, which occurred under presidents of both parties, was seen by the public or in Washington as a grievous insult to America generally, or through a partisan filter, or as evidence of systematic failure by the U.S. government requiring root-to-branch investigations with presumptions of perfidy at the top. Rather, they were treated the same way Chris Stevens’s murder (the first of a U.S. ambassador since 1979) should be seen: as brave diplomats killed in the line of duty.

The third effect of the hostage crisis was to make politicians and the State Department so paranoid about security that they turned U.S. embassies into fortresses and put tight restrictions on the movement of staff. This has certainly saved American lives. But it’s also made it much harder for our diplomats to do their jobs—a point that the foreign correspondent and former Washington Monthly editor Robert Worth made in the New York Times Magazine in 2012. As a foreign correspondent myself in the mid-1990s I remember senior U.S. foreign service officers expressing envy at my ability to travel to wherever the action was and interview people—an absolutely vital way of learning what’s happening on the ground that they could no longer do without heavy security, or, in many cases, at all. A reporter friend of mine in Sarajevo in 1995 who later served as a USAID officer in Pakistan used to complain to me that he felt like a prisoner in the embassy in Islamabad, unable, really, to do his job effectively.

Ambassadors make the calls on diplomatic security matters in their domains, so they have more leeway to decide where, when, and how they travel. But the pressure on them from their staffs and Washington not to take chances is intense.

Chris Stevens famously pushed back against that pressure in 2011 when, as U.S. envoy to Libya, he was the U.S. government’s main interlocutor to the rebels who ultimately overthrew Moammar Ghadhafi. Stevens, who spoke the Libyan dialect of Arabic, lived openly in Benghazi with minimal security. His actions during that period became legendary among U.S. diplomats. It was an act of patriotic bravery, repeated a year late when, as ambassador, he returned to Benghazi, knowing as well as anyone the poor security situation there. We need more Chris Stevenses in our diplomatic corps. The Republicans in Congress are doing everything they can to make sure we have fewer, even if that isn’t their intention.

K-12’s coming fiscal cliff

When our son, the second of our two kids, graduated from high school this past June, my wife and I realized that he wasn’t the only one making a transition. For us, two decades of intense involvement with the public school system was abruptly ending. No more dropping kids off at school every morning (my job). No more volunteering in the library (her job). No more parent-teacher conferences, football games, talent shows, art fairs, and spring fund-raisers with moon bounces. From now on, the only time we are likely to set foot in a public school is to vote.

My wife and I are later-stage Baby Boomers, born in 1958, near the generation’s peak birth year. So our various life milestones tend to have oversized ramifications. In this case, the ramification to worry about is that as our kids leave the nest and we move toward retirement, our generation’s support for the public schools will decline.

That’s certainly the historic pattern. Numerous studies show that as the proportion of the older people in a community increases, support for school bond issues and per-pupil spending decline. This is especially true among whites when the percentage of nonwhite students entering the schools grows, which is exactly what’s happening now.

Combine that with the fact that my late-boomer generation’s children are Millennials, who came of age in the ravaged post-Great Recession economy and are delaying marriage and families accordingly (our twenty-six-year-old daughter is smack in the middle of that demographic). It’ll be a while before the bulk of the Millennials have school-age kids of their own, and hence the extra incentive to invest their tax dollars in the system. This means that America may be headed toward a sort of educational fiscal cliff in which support for K-12 education drops for an extended period of time, at least among middle-class and affluent whites.

I can think of one possible countertrend. American suburbs, where most people live, are aging, and undeveloped land in those suburbs is disappearing. When that happens, home prices become more tied to the perceived quality of public schools, and spending on schools tends to go up, according to a study by Christian Hilber of the London School of Economics and Christopher Mayer of the Columbia Business School. If you oppose, as I do, encouraging endless expansion of the suburban fringe, and favor developing older, closer-in suburbs, here’s another reason to think we’re right: it’s good for the public schools.

Quit outsourcing junkets

One point this magazine has been hammering away at for a while is that the best way Congress can insulate itself from the influence of moneyed interests is to increase its own capacity to gather information independently, rather than rely on those same interests for such information. A good example of this are the trips lawmakers take overseas during recesses. Such trips can provide lawmakers with a crucial on-the-ground sense of what’s going on in countries where U.S. interests are engaged. They can also look to voters like subsidized vacations for elected officials (and sometimes they are). So Congress has developed what it considers a politically palatable workaround: let outside nonprofit groups pay for this “officially connected” travel, with elaborate rules to ensure transparency of the funding sources.

In 2013, ten lawmakers and their staffs visited Azerbaijan, a repressive, strategically located, oil-rich former Soviet republic not known as a glamorous getaway. Azerbaijan is exactly the kind of country we should want our elected officials to know something about. The trip was sponsored by five nonprofit groups with names like “the Turkic American Federation of Midwest.” It was later revealed that the nonprofits had been secret pass-throughs for a trip actually paid for by Azerbaijan’s state oil company, which was seeking relief from U.S. sanctions for an oil pipeline.

In late July, after a lengthy investigation, the House Ethics Committee cleared the congresspeople and their staff of any wrongdoing—an understandable ruling, since the same committee had preapproved the trip and there was no evidence that the lawmakers or their staff knew in advance about the secret funding scheme. But it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that the trip garnered a less than objective view of the situation in Azerbaijan, given who paid for it.

The frustrating thing is that the whole controversy could have been avoided had Congress—which, you’ll recall from your reading of the U.S. Constitution, has the power of the purse—simply paid the several hundred thousand dollars the trip cost with government funds. Instead, it allowed itself to get played by a foreign government, then commenced an elaborate internal investigation—including the perusal of nearly 190,000 pages of materials—which, if you added up the expense, probably cost as much or more than the trip itself.

“A catalog of horrors”

In the winter of 2013, a fellow Greek American friend of mine with good political connections asked if I wanted to interview Alexis Tsipras, head of the radical-left SYRIZA party and, my friend said, “probably the next prime minister of Greece.” I jumped at the chance, and my interview with Tsipras ran in our March/April 2013 issue.

Tsipras struck me as a nice guy: upbeat, articulate, nonchalant. I couldn’t find much to disagree with in what he had to say: that the regime of austerity that Greece’s European creditors had imposed was “madness” and would only prolong the country’s Depression-level economic suffering; that “Greece does need structural reforms and it needs them soon”; but that the European powers also need to reciprocate by negotiating “a further haircut to the debt and a moratorium on payment of the debt, so that we can … [help] the Greek economy recover and [allow] Greek citizens to live in dignity.”

In January of this year, Tsipras did become prime minister. Anyone who’s been reading the papers knows what happened next. A half a year of endless high-wire negotiations began, with Greece’s controversial finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, battling the creditors, led by Germany, who moved not an inch. In July, after a referendum on the latest draconian European offer in which Greek voters basically told the creditors to fuck off, Tsipras relented. Greece agreed to further tax increases, government pension cuts and reforms of Greece’s stifling business regulation, and privatization of government-owned assets like electric utilities, in return for another bailout package, virtually all the money from which will flow right back into European government banks.

Some of the reforms may, in the long run, benefit Greece. But there’s not even a pretense on either side that the deal (which as of this writing isn’t finalized) will do anything in the short to medium term to lift the Greek economy. Indeed, conditions in Greece are considerably worse than they were before Tsipras took over and deteriorating fast.

Did anything good come from SYRIZA’s quixotic efforts? Well, one of the creditors, the International Monetary Fund, is now saying that because it’s clear (as Tsipras has long maintained) that Greece cannot repay all its loans, the IMF won’t sign off on any deal that doesn’t include further debt relief. But the IMF was moving in that direction anyway.

I do think, however, that Greece’s resistance led to a substantial change in elite world opinion. Back in the spring, when I talked to friends—worldly, plugged-in, liberal-leaning people—their attitude was “Why can’t those Greeks get their house in order?” That was a fair reflection of how the story was being covered in the media, with most of the blame put on Greece for its (quite real) fiscal profligacy and chicanery and the erratic behavior of its negotiators. But over time, the coverage shifted. More and more stories emphasized the injustice of a German-led austerity regime that had failed for five years to work as advertised and was only eviscerating average Greeks (and possibly driving the country into the arms of Russia, which has dangled the possibility of aid).

Then, in July, Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, admitted publicly what he’s long been saying privately: he wants Greece out of the euro. He didn’t get his way; France and Italy insisted Greece should be allowed to stay. But the terms of the deal Schäuble finally got Tsipras to agree to were shockingly severe; even Der Spiegel, Germany’s biggest newsmagazine, labeled them “a catalog of horrors.”

The deal is actually worse than the press has portrayed it. The Greek economy has long been dominated by a few dozen wealthy families, known as “the oligarchs.” They own the country’s major media outlets, control its politicians, and support the stifling business regulations that keep out competition and allow them to dominate government contracting. The oligarchs have long since moved much of their money out of Greece. But when the mandated privatizations begin, they will likely use those funds—currently safely ensconced in offshore or European banks—to buy government assets at fire-sale prices, thus increasing their grip on the country.

In the aftermath of the deal, Germany’s reputation has taken a well-deserved beating, and the elite press has been filled with speculation about whether this raw display of German power might eventually lead other countries, like France and Italy, who chafe under that power themselves, to leave the euro.

I lived in Germany for a year and am fond of the country and its people. But Tsipras made a point to me in his interview that, though it infuriates the German government, still holds true: “Back in 1953, under the London Debt Agreement, America asked European countries, including Greece, to agree to write off 60 percent of Germany’s debts from World War II and to put a moratorium on debt repayments. That was accepted as a solution. What we are asking from Germany is basically the same.”

The post Tilting at Windmills appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Two years ago this month, President Barack Obama made a bold promise: Starting with the 2015-16 academic year, his administration would rate every college and university in America. Instead of comparing colleges with the wealth and prestige measures used by the likes of U.S. News & World Report, he said, “what we want to do is rate them on who’s offering the best value, so students and taxpayers get a bigger bang for their buck.”

The announcement was greeted warmly at the Washington Monthly. After all, we’ve been ranking colleges on such measures since 2005, and even added a “Best Bang for the Buck” ranking in 2012. But we also knew that the road to a federal ratings system would be strewn with obstacles. As Laura Colarusso and Jon Marcus reported in these pages last year, the formidable higher education lobby quickly launched an effort to kill the Obama ratings plan in the cradle. By mobilizing local college presidents and forging a strange-bedfellows alliance with conservative lawmakers in Congress, higher ed lobbyists attacked the ratings from every available angle.

In the end, they succeeded. In late June of this year, the administration canceled its ratings plan until further notice. Additional, unspecified raw data about colleges might be released. But there would be no judgment as to what those numbers meant, no celebration of colleges that succeeded in educating a diverse student body at a reasonable price, and no condemnation of those that failed.

Fortunately, there is a place where you can get this kind of information, though without the powerful imprimatur of the federal government, and that’s right here in the Washington Monthly. In this issue, we present our annual college guide, devoted to in-depth stories on what’s going wrong with America’s higher education system—a target-rich environment these days, sad to say—and how to turn things around. Anchoring our coverage are our annual college rankings, in which we chuck the U.S. News-validated idea that the “best” schools are the ones that spend the most money, exclude the most students, and impress a small circle of elites. We think that those criteria have helped lead the higher education system down its current ruinous path.

Instead, we rank four-year colleges in America on three measures that would make the whole system better, if only schools would compete on them. The first is upward mobility: Are schools enrolling and graduating students of modest means and charging them a reasonable price? The second is research: Are they preparing undergraduates to earn PhDs, and creating the new technologies and ideas that will drive economic growth and advance human knowledge? The third is service: Are schools encouraging their students to give back to the country by joining the military or the Peace Corps, or at least letting them use their work-study money to do community service rather than making them on-campus office slaves?

The complete list of our rankings begins here, and a detailed methodology can be found on our website (here and here). Our 2015 Best Bang for the Buck rankings are here.

It turns out that ranking colleges by social mobility, research, and service produces strikingly different results than U.S. News. The boxes below compare the two rankings for national universities and liberal arts colleges respectively. Here are a few highlights:

Public-Private Partisanship

On the U.S. News list, nineteen of the top twenty universities are private, as are nearly all the top colleges. Public institutions that serve a wide range of students fare much better by our measures. Sixteen of our twenty highest-ranked universities are taxpayer supported, and only two privates, Stanford and Harvard, make the top ten on our list of national universities.

As it has in previous years, the University of California system dominates our national university rankings, with a combination of research prowess and economic diversity among undergraduates. Compared to barely public institutions like the University of Virginia (sixty-third on our list), where only a few more than one in ten students are poor enough to qualify for the federal Pell Grant, top-ranked UC San Diego and UC Riverside enjoy international reputations for scholarship while enrolling racially and economically diverse student bodies. Other standout publics on our list include Texas A&M, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Liberal Bias

There are also many worthy liberal arts colleges in our rankings, with women’s colleges and historically black colleges like Bryn Mawr and Claflin University standing out.

The New College of Florida, a rare public liberal arts college, also makes our top twenty. Berea College in Kentucky, ranked third on our list, specializes in educating low-income, first-generation college students, at a price that’s virtually free. In a time when researchers are increasingly questioning how much undergraduates actually learn while they’re in college, liberal arts schools often provide the intensive, personalized learning environments where students thrive.

Hidden Gems

There are also hundreds of baccalaureate and master’s-granting institutions that don’t compete for students nationally and instead serve as the workhorse institutions of American higher education, providing affordable degrees with strong ties to regional economies. Creighton University in Nebraska, our third-ranked master’s university, graduates over three-quarters of its students and sends an unusual number on to earn PhDs. Truman State, a public university in Missouri, has similar graduation rates and affordable tuition, and excels at enrolling students in both the Peace Corps and the ROTC.

Both of our top two baccalaureate colleges, the public Elizabeth City State in North Carolina and the private Tuskegee University in Alabama, are historically black institutions, continuing the trend we see in our liberal arts college rankings. Cooper Union’s graduation rate and success in producing future PhDs keeps it highly ranked, despite the fact that administrative bungling led the historically tuition-free institution to start levying charges for the first time last year.
The outrage voiced by Cooper Union students and alumni over the huge tuition increase joined a chorus of price-focused criticism that has come to dominate the politics of higher education in recent years. It has never been more expensive to go to college in America, and many of the public colleges and universities that have historically been one of the few reliable pathways to prosperity for the poor and the middle class are rapidly boosting tuition toward private market rates. The success of the UC system on our rankings is more a testament to the durability of its original design than to the good work of its present-day stewards. Over the last two decades (and especially right after the 2008 financial crisis), the UC system has been rocked by budget reductions imposed by a legislature more interested in tax cuts and mass incarceration than building a world-class higher education system for the twenty-first century.

The few private universities near the top of our list, such as Harvard and Stanford, are there because they have accumulated incredible amounts of wealth, allowing them to offer generous financial aid to the lower-income students they admit. This is a commendable but irreplicable model. And as Mamie Voight and Colleen Campbell note in this issue, many public universities are shirking their obligations to enroll and graduate a reasonable share of low-income students. Because institutions such as Penn State University (all the way down at number eighty-four in our rankings) appear to have little desire to promote socioeconomic mobility, tens of thousands of students are being shut out of universities where they would have a better chance of earning a degree.

The swell of public anger over the high price of college and rising levels of student debt is now manifesting itself in national politics at the highest level. The Democratic presidential contenders Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley have already released proposals for free public higher education and “debt-free college,” and overwhelming favorite Hillary Clinton is expected to release her own, similar plan soon. Whoever wins the nomination will have a knowledgeable and crucially placed ally in the chancellor of Louisiana State University, F. King Alexander. As Alexander Holt’s in-depth profile describes, King Alexander has spent the last two decades fighting a lonely battle to roll back a momentous and largely unknown set of policy decisions made in the early 1970s, in which a cabal of New England politicians and college leaders struck a far-reaching bargain that guaranteed vast public revenues to private institutions with no public accountability. The LSU president believes that decision doomed American higher education to perpetually rising prices. Now it appears that his moment has arrived.

Political pressure on colleges is also building on other fronts. Caroline Frederickson argues that the long-term reduction in the proportion of college classes taught by tenure-track professors is part and parcel of the broad societal trend of more “contingent labor.” Somehow, none of the cost savings produced by this exploitation have been passed on to students in the form of lower prices. Now adjunct professors are agitating to unionize even as courts are beginning to challenge the legality of contingent labor arrangements in other industries.

The biggest obstacle to setting higher education on a better path is the belief, shared by many Americans and used to advantage by college lobbyists making common cause with congressional Republicans, that the federal government shouldn’t be allowed to regulate colleges in any meaningful way. In reality, the absence of effective regulation is what aids and abets crushing tuition hikes. The federal aid system that King Alexander wants to reform is a blank check for higher education—$150 billion per year in student grants and loans, in exchange for virtually no accountability for results. Alexander believes that state governments should be prohibited from wantonly cutting university budgets, and he’s right.

Of course, effective regulation can’t be taken for granted. As Samuel Bagenstos describes, inept federal oversight has allowed many universities to botch the implementation of the sexual assault prevention provisions of Title IX of the federal Higher Education Act, by withdrawing into shells of bureaucratic compliance that seriously threaten the ideals of free speech. The U.S. Department of Education will need to be overhauled with enough talent and regulatory muscle to preserve the independence and diversity of the higher education sector while ensuring that all institutions receiving public dollars fulfill their public commitments in exchange.

Identifying institutions and leaders that are already leading the nation in this regard is an annual mission for the Washington Monthly college guide. Matthew Connolly’s list of America’s most innovative college presidents shows that it’s possible to expand research and provide a great education to large numbers of economically and racially diverse students, even in a perilous financial environment. These women and men lead institutions ranging from community colleges to small historically black institutions to enormous research universities. But in each case, the presidents are intensely focused on the educational well-being of their students, communities, and nation.

Similarly, Mary Alice McCarthy describes how some states are experimenting with a promising “upside-down bachelor’s degree,” in which work-focused students can begin their college careers by spending two years acquiring valuable skills that lead to good jobs, and then completing the broader general education requirements necessary for a bachelor’s degree and that credential’s long-term benefits in work and life. The challenge is to create an environment of federal regulations and broader societal values that motivates state policymakers and college leaders to make examples like these the rule instead of the exception. For that to happen, Jamie Merisotis contends, the federal government needs to get its own house in order by reorganizing far-flung agencies into a new U.S. Department of Talent.

What’s needed most, though, is better information and metrics, including data on student outcomes, so that the incentives that push producers in other markets to provide better quality at lower prices can work in higher education, too. The Obama ratings plan was supposed to serve that purpose. But there is a potential silver lining in its failure. The still-unspecified data elements that the administration has promised to release later this year—the raw material that should have been used to construct new ratings—could include measures of how much money students earn after graduating from individual colleges. This information exists. The U.S. Department of Education has been sitting on it for months. We suspect that paltry results for graduates of a number of expensive private colleges were one of the reasons the ratings plan was scuttled.

But the future is undoubtedly one in which more information will emerge about what colleges are doing for their country, instead of themselves. When it does, we’ll be ready to identify both the best and the worst, on your behalf.

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

Bourbon Empire: The Past
and Future of America’s Whiskey
by Reid Mitenbuler
Viking, 320 pp.

Behind those shelves lies a complex history of regulation, corruption, wealth, and power. In his book Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America’s Whiskey, Reid Mitenbuler seeks to illuminate some of the lesser-known aspects of bourbon’s path to becoming America’s signature spirit. Walking away from this book may leave you a bit discouraged about how readily we bourbon drinkers have consumed the industry’s marketing ploys—terms like “craft” and “single barrel” are entirely unregulated, it turns out, and mean virtually nothing. And that legend on the label, detailing the namesake’s hardscrabble success story, is almost certainly made up. (For instance, Michter’s suggestion that George Washington served their alcohol to his troops during the Revolution makes for a good story, but in reality, the modern version of that brand, which purports to date back to 1753, has only existed since the 1990s.) In Mitenbuler’s telling, however, those fabrications don’t undermine the reality that even the large-batch, several-barrel bourbon we’re drinking today is still high quality and authentic.

Bourbon Empire is primarily a history, one that stretches back to the eighteenth century. Mitenbuler uses the dichotomy of Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian politics to frame the industry’s various themes and changing tides. This contrast is clearly illustrated by the fight over the controversial whiskey tax that led to the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 and embodied the core existential crises of a nation still finding its identity. Hamilton’s advocacy for the tax positioned him as a friend of bankers, big business, and the elite. Jefferson’s opposition allied him with small farmers and agrarianism writ large. While the tax did pass in 1791, it was repealed when Jefferson entered office in 1801.

Mitenbuler describes the modern whiskey industry as a blend, as it were, of the visions of Jefferson and Hamilton. From its early days, the bourbon industry took great efforts to portray bourbon as “an icon of frontier independence—of Jefferson’s yeoman farmer.” But with many bottles to fill, Hamiltonianism had its charm: as Mitenbuler puts it bluntly, “Hamilton’s vision was a good way to get that whiskey into bottles efficiently.”

After a choppy first few chapters—which mostly oscillate between describing the wonky details of how whiskey is made, and characterizing assorted presidents’ alcohol preferences (Washington preferred brandy, and Jefferson snobbishly eschewed whiskey for the higher-brow wine)—Mitenbuler picks up bourbon’s narrative around the Civil War. By that time, whiskey was a widely consumed beverage (though it was also still occasionally used for cleaning wounds). The book moves quickly through the 1800s, briefly discussing the Whiskey Trust of the late 1880s and its attempts to monopolize the industry before being pursued by the U.S. government under the Sherman Antitrust Act. The bulk of the book, though, focuses on the whiskey magnates of the twentieth century, and their looming legacies in today’s consolidated whiskey industry.

At the center of Mitenbuler’s story is Prohibition, on its face a huge obstacle for the bourbon industry, but also a boon for the underground bourbon economy and its champions. During Prohibition, entrepreneurial types such as Lewis Rosenstiel, who would become one of the most powerful men in the industry, bought closed distilleries and their whiskey stocks to prepare for repeal, which they considered inevitable. In the meantime, they took advantage of a Prohibition loophole that allowed doctors, dentists, and veterinarians to prescribe up to one pint of 100 proof spirits every ten days. High-end doctors would give patients bourbon that was bottled and crafted essentially the same as before Prohibition, except with a four-word caveat on the label: “Unexcelled for Medicinal Purposes.”

When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, men like Rosenstiel seized the opportunity to solidify their control over the bourbon industry. Consolidation in the industry began to accelerate. Between 1933 and 1958 the number of distilleries dropped from 130 to seventy-six as the bigger companies expanded through acquisition. By the end of that period, the top four distilleries controlled more than 75 percent of the market. And few attempts were made to reel in the power of these giants. In 1952, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on whiskey monopolies, but nothing came of it. In the postwar era, whiskey was booming. Not only was whiskey patriotic, but the whiskey lobby had grown in strength over the prior decades.

Soon, Americans’ devotion to their favorite spirit would be codified into law. Worried about losing his foothold to foreign producers, Rosenstiel used his lobby shop, the Bourbon Institute, to convince Congress that bourbon deserved a trade designation to preserve its uniquely American provenance. In 1964, Congress passed a resolution declaring bourbon “a distinctive product of the United States,” protecting the domestic market from foreign imitations. (Bourbon companies can be, and are, owned by foreign companies and headquartered overseas, but production must happen stateside.) The legacy of this protection is still felt: today, nearly 95 percent of bourbon is produced in Kentucky. Over 40 percent of that production is controlled by Beam Suntory, producer of Jim Beam, Maker’s Mark, Old Grand-Dad, Old Crow, Old Overholt, and Knob Creek, among many other spirits.

Giving an account of the power brokers in the bourbon industry inevitably means a history that features almost exclusively white men. But there is a taste of diversity in the script of bourbon’s history, to be found in the prominent role of Jewish immigrants in the early bourbon boom. Today, the bottles on liquor store shelves bear names like Craig, Beam, Harper, Daniels, Walker, or Williams. But a representative ode to bourbon’s greats might include Bronfman, Lehman, Shapira, Abelson, and Wertheimer, in addition to Rosenstiel. In the industry’s early days, however, it was assumed that bottles sporting these names wouldn’t sell to a nativist and anti-Semitic American citizenry. But Mitenbuler dedicates ample inches to discussing the largely unrecognized contributions of this cohort, one of the great gifts of this book to the historical record of American bourbon.

The notion of an industry that is able to marry the economic worldviews of Jefferson and Hamilton is certainly pleasant to imagine. But the consolidation of today’s industry would suggest that for all practical purposes, Hamilton’s vision has won out. As consolidation has swept many American industries, so has the whiskey industry been concentrated to just a few companies. Today, thirteen distilleries produce nearly 95 percent of all the whiskey consumed in America, and those distilleries are owned by eight companies. (That percentage was virtually 100 before the recent whiskey renaissance saw the opening of many truly independent distilleries.) The distilleries sell their product to many brands you’ve heard of—one of the biggest, the unromantically named Midwest Grain Products Ingredients, sells its whiskey to Templeton, Bulleit Rye, and others.

Mitenbuler asks the right questions about today’s whiskey industry—centrally: Is big inherently bad? As the bourbon industry has grown, has it lost touch with its image of “independence, self-sufficiency, and aversion to arbitrary rules?” But when he answers these questions he focuses mainly on how such consolidation might affect quality. Large-scale bourbon producers, he argues, are still putting out high-quality products—in many instances, better tasting than the smaller-batch distilleries. And this settles the point for him. “The size of a still, big or small, pot or column, has far less impact on a whiskey’s quality than the skill and know-how of the distiller operating it,” he says. So long as the giants still employ top-notch distillers, the quality of our whiskey won’t be in jeopardy.

But quality is only one metric of a healthy industry. While the illusion of choice may be, in Mitenbuler’s view, largely innocuous so long as the product tastes good, it’s still an illusion, one that has most consumers fooled. Sure, there are more whiskey distilleries today than there were five or ten years ago. But most consumers, especially those outside of urban centers, can’t avoid choosing a bottle produced by one of the big eight, if not the big four. And those biggest corporations can use their monopolistic power to change the product’s recipe, proof, distribution, or price without much obstacle or transparency for consumers. The dominance of these giants also makes it more difficult for new distillers to produce and market their whiskey, limiting our options as we peruse the liquor store shelves.

Attempting to discuss both the history and the contemporary context of bourbon is difficult, and Mitenbuler handles the tension gracefully. Bourbon Empire is a page-turner, and not only for the incredible number of party facts you will accumulate in the course of turning those pages. (For instance, did you know that a spirit’s “proof” was originally determined by mixing it with gunpowder and setting it on fire? If the mixture burned too low it was “under proof,” and a flare-up meant it was “over proof.” An even flame meant the whiskey was about 50 percent alcohol by volume, and therefore “100 percent proved.” Now you can tell your friends why dividing the proof in half determines a spirit’s alcohol percentage.) The more cynical bourbon drinker might disagree with Mitenbuler’s optimistic conclusions about the shape of today’s industry. But whether you’re a bourbon nerd curious to know what distilling techniques your favorite brand prefers, or a history buff interested in the faces and names behind one of our country’s iconic industries, Bourbon Empire offers a perspective you haven’t encountered before.

The post The Whiskey Ain’t Workin’ Anymore appeared first on Washington Monthly.

I want to caution you against Kurt because of his wickedness, his utter disregard of any moral standards, while he is pursuing his ambitions, and against a friendship with Oppus, because of his desire to dominate you ideologically and monopolize you physically. This does not mean that a friendship with Oppus is impossible, I would only advise you not to become too fascinated by him.

Kissinger disclaimed any selfish motive for writing, loftily quoted from Washington’s farewell address, and regretted with some bitterness Edith’s failure to read or comment on the two school book reports he had sent her. Would she please return them for his files?

Kissinger: The Idealist,
1923-1968
by Niall Ferguson
Penguin Press, 1008 pp.

It is unfair to judge a man’s character by a jealous letter that he drafted (and did not send) at age sixteen. Yet here, to a remarkable extent, is the future nuclear strategist, national security advisor, and secretary of state. The reference to Edith’s attractiveness bespeaks the charm and flattery for which Kissinger would become famous. Secrecy and deceit are present also: he went behind his friends’ backs and coyly advised against a relationship with “any one of us,” which of course really meant the other guys. By trashing his buddies in order to get a girl, Kissinger displayed ruthlessness. The letter is written in what Christopher Hitchens memorably described as Kissinger’s “dank obfuscatory prose,” which relies on clinical-sounding phrases like “dominate you ideologically.” And, of course, the letter betrays vanity. How could anyone fail to be dazzled by his book reports!

The conservative historian Niall Ferguson presents this letter in Kissinger: The Idealist, 1923-1968, the first volume of his massive two-part biography of the controversial statesman. Yet Ferguson reads the letter and reaches a different conclusion. It stands out, Ferguson writes, not because it reveals unsavory character traits that Kissinger would display throughout his public life, but for its “analytical precision and psychological penetration.” Ferguson concedes that the letter is “solipsistic,” and the product of youthful jealousy. Yet he cannot help but admire the young strategist at work: even the boy Kissinger could analyze a series of interlocking relationships, parse the competing interests, and make a power play.

Ferguson is Kissinger’s authorized biographer, and in 1,000 pages he begins the task of rescuing his subject’s tarnished reputation. It is a steep climb. The foreign policy chief for Presidents Nixon and Ford has been portrayed in dozens of books and by countless witnesses as a coddler of dictators, a cynical practitioner of realpolitik, a war-monger, a suck-up to superiors, and a tyrant to subordinates—his genius and wit matched only by his underhandedness. Hitchens’s The Trial of Henry Kissinger is the most entertaining such book, but unbecoming portraits also appear in prominent works by Seymour Hersh, Robert Dallek, Margaret MacMillan, and, most recently, Greg Grandin, whose Kissinger’s Shadow just arrived in August. Woody Allen had his say in the mockumentary Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story, and so did the novelist Joseph Heller, who described Kissinger as “an odious shlump who made war gladly.” Kissinger’s leading biographer, Walter Isaacson, was less hostile but still cutting, summing up Kissinger as “a brilliant conceptualizer” who was “slightly conspiratorial in outlook.” He “could feel the connections [between far-flung events] the way a spider senses twitches in its web.”

Kissinger’s Shadow:
The Long Reach of America’s
Most Controversial Statesman
by Greg Grandin
Metropolitan Books, 288 pp.

What drives this animosity—especially toward a man who used to be widely admired? Ferguson has several theories. Perhaps it is envy. Kissinger coined many bon mots and had a way with women; the haters may simply be jealous. Another possibility is that the many witnesses against Kissinger had axes to grind—although this begs the question whether Kissinger’s own behavior invited the axes. Ferguson also perceives anti-Semitism at work. There is somewhat more substance to this charge. Kissinger’s family fled Nazi Germany for the United States in 1938, and he became a conspicuous butt of jokes in the casually prejudiced Nixon White House: the professor with the curly hair and the funny accent. Yet it is worth pointing out that Kissinger’s two most ferocious mainstream critics, Hitchens and Hersh, were themselves Jewish. More than that, it feels manipulative to play on our sympathies for a man who famously has so little sympathy for others.

The subtitle of this volume gives some indication of what Ferguson is missing in his psychoanalysis of Kissinger’s critics: The Idealist. The author’s revisionist thesis is that Kissinger was not in fact a realist, as he is so frequently portrayed. Hence Ferguson provides lofty epigrams from his subject to begin his chapters, such as this one: “It is true that ours is an attempt to exhibit Western values, but less by what we say than by what we do.” He shows us Kissinger moralizing against the use of “small countries as pawns” in the game of global strategy. Ferguson even quotes Kissinger privately scolding the Kennedy administration (those “unscrupulous pragmatists”) for tacitly authorizing the assassination of South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem: “The honor and the moral standing of the United States require that a relationship exists between ends and means.… Our historical role has been to identify ourselves with the ideals and deepest hopes of mankind.”

Horseshit. By reproducing these quotations with a straight face, Ferguson has made himself a hypocrite’s bullhorn. The ideals and deepest hopes of mankind? Kissinger and Nixon bombed Cambodia to pieces in a secret four-year campaign that annihilated some 100,000 civilians. “Anything that flies, on anything that moves,” were the parameters Kissinger gave to Alexander Haig. He countered African liberation movements by embracing the white supremacists of Rhodesia and South Africa, a policy known as the “Tar Baby option.” Kissinger facilitated the overthrow of the governments of Chile and Argentina by right-wing generals, and then worked tirelessly to deflect criticism of the new governments’ torture and murder. A declassified memorandum of his meeting with Augusto Pinochet in 1976 shows Kissinger in a particularly unflattering light: “We welcomed the overthrow of the Communist-inclined government here. We are not out to weaken your position.” In 1975 Kissinger and President Ford met with Indonesian strongman Suharto and authorized him to invade East Timor, which he promptly did the following day; another 100,000 lost their lives. “It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly,” Kissinger advised.

Henry Kissinger is entitled to a defense, but outfitting him in the white robes of idealism is not the way to go about it. Tellingly, at several points in the narrative Ferguson strays from his thesis and defends Kissinger on more utilitarian grounds: the Cold War was real, its outcome was uncertain, and the United States needed every ugly advantage it could find on the geostrategic battlefield. The crimes of communist regimes vastly dwarfed Kissinger’s in scope and scale, Ferguson writes. That is fine as far as it goes, but when Ferguson takes this line further, the reader begins to squirm:

[A]rguments that focus on loss of life in strategically marginal countries—and there is no other way of describing Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, and East Timor—must be tested against this question: how, in each case, would an alternative decision have affected U.S. relations with strategically important countries like the Soviet Union, China, and the major Western European powers?

It is a fair question, if callously put. Having set the terms of debate, Ferguson is now on the hook for his next volume to weigh the strategic implications of Kissinger’s most barbaric foreign policies once he assumed power. Ferguson must explore the impact that reining in Suharto rather than stepping aside might have had on the U.S.-Indonesia alliance, and on broader Cold War dynamics. He must analyze what would have become of Chile and Latin America more broadly had the United States not engineered the overthrow of Chile’s democratically elected government in favor of the fascist Pinochet. And not to overlook Kissinger’s strategic boners: Ferguson must consider the implications for the Middle East over the past forty years had Kissinger not inaugurated the policy of wholehearted support for the Shah of Iran in the early 1970s. The answers had better be good.

Kissinger begins in a defensive posture, with the author anticipating that because Kissinger asked him to write the book, readers will assume he was “influenced or induced to paint a falsely flattering picture.” It is true that an authorized biographer must win his reader’s trust. But Ferguson’s problem is not a conflict of interest: it is his ideological affinity with his subject, and his determination because of that affinity to present his man favorably. This begins with Ferguson’s use of language, which repeatedly seeks to bring the reader onto Kissinger’s side. Here are a few representative examples: “Never one to shirk the front line,” Kissinger set off on a fact-finding trip to Vietnam. That country “awakened the man of action long dormant inside the professor.” “Even more impressive” than the depth of his knowledge “is Kissinger’s brilliance as a prose stylist.” As a lowly State Department consultant, “he was required to fly economy the whole way” to Hong Kong. Poor Dr. Kissinger!

Ferguson spends much of the book attempting to rehabilitate Kissinger’s character. He makes an unpersuasive attempt to convince readers that Kissinger was not the relentless ladder climber we think we know. As a graduate student and then a professor at Harvard in the 1950s, Kissinger edited the journal Confluence and organized the university’s International Seminar. Various writers have noted that this work put Kissinger in touch with leaders-on-the-make from around the world: future foreign secretaries, journalists, and policymakers. Yet Ferguson maintains that Kissinger was above such considerations. “A more plausible conclusion is that Kissinger sincerely saw the two parallel ventures as the most effective contributions he could make to a psychological war against Soviet communism to which he was sincerely committed.” No fewer than five future prime ministers attended the seminar in the 1950s and ’60s, and Kissinger made a point of inviting luminaries like then Vice President Nixon. But Ferguson seems to think he was too idealistic to network.

The book also largely sidesteps the topic of Kissinger’s famous vanity, thin skin, and penchant for insincere flattery. (This is a man whose memoirs are longer than the combined memoirs of Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan.) Yet when Ferguson addresses Kissinger’s interpersonal traits, it is usually to defend his subject. For instance, Kissinger left academia to advise Nelson Rockefeller on foreign policy throughout the 1960s as the moderate Republican repeatedly sought his party’s presidential nomination. Both of Rockefeller’s biographers, Richard Norton Smith and Cary Reich, portray Kissinger as obsequious to his boss’s face (Smith: “deferential to the point of sycophancy”; Reich: “downright fawning”) yet derisive about him when Rockefeller was not around. We know from many witnesses that a similar pattern prevailed between Kissinger and Nixon the following decade. Yet Ferguson is not convinced: “This does not ring true. Theirs was a turbulent friendship.” Reich cites two separate eyewitness accounts, but Ferguson dismisses them without explaining why they should be disbelieved.

Ferguson concludes this volume with a revisionist telling of Kissinger’s infamous maneuverings during the 1968 presidential election. Hersh was the first to write—and Isaacson and others have verified—that after Rockefeller dropped out of the race, Kissinger provided the Nixon campaign with inside information about the progress of the Vietnam peace talks then under way in Paris. Kissinger had contacts on the staff of the U.S. delegation, and he pumped them for details. He learned that a deal was coming together: Lyndon Johnson would halt the bombing of North Vietnam, and in return North Vietnam would finally come to the table. Kissinger provided information and analysis to Nixon’s aide Richard Allen in breathless telephone calls, which he insisted be kept secret. Nixon’s campaign subsequently passed word to the South Vietnamese government that it could obtain better peace terms under a Nixon administration. South Vietnam pulled out of the talks just days before the U.S. election, the Democratic Party was humiliated, Nixon won the presidency—and then he immediately appointed Kissinger, a man he had met only once, his national security advisor.

Many witnesses have confirmed the main contours of this account, including Richard Holbrooke, a staffer for the U.S. delegation to Paris; John Mitchell, H. R. Haldeman, and Richard Allen of Nixon’s staff; and Nixon himself, who wrote about Kissinger’s efforts in his memoir. Johnson referred to the maneuver—spiking a peace deal in order to win an election, thereby extending the Vietnam War—as treason. Yet Ferguson again is not convinced. He questions Allen’s reliability as a witness and contends that Nixon’s memoir does not prove that Kissinger was his insider. (Decide for yourself. Here is Nixon: “During the last days of the campaign, when Kissinger was providing us with information about the bombing halt, I became more aware of both his knowledge and his influence.”) Ferguson also makes the legalistic argument that Kissinger’s intervention was not determinative, for Nixon had other informers, and North Vietnam “would surely” have found a pretext to abandon the peace talks had South Vietnam not walked out first. If we use Johnson’s terms, I suppose that reduces the charge to attempted treason.

Ferguson also writes, “If Henry Kissinger really was so keen for a government job after the 1968 election, was leaking sensitive information about the Vietnam negotiations to Richard Nixon—who was by no means guaranteed to win—the
obvious way to get it?” The first response to this strange rhetorical question is to point out that no presidential candidate is guaranteed to win an election. The second is to note that Kissinger hedged his bets, simultaneously approaching the campaign of the Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey and dangling files of opposition research on Nixon, whom he claimed to loathe. (One of Humphrey’s staffers called this double dealing “grotesque.”) And the third response to Ferguson’s question is to emphasize the opportunistic nature of Kissinger’s movements. He had picked another candidate in Rockefeller, but Rockefeller lost his party’s nomination. So Kissinger set about wooing the Republican and Democratic candidates in any way he could. Ingratiating oneself to both presidential campaigns at the eleventh hour seems like exactly the way to get a government job.

Kissinger’s complete legacy is beyond the scope of Ferguson’s book, which ends just before Kissinger assumes power in 1969. But it is the subject of Greg Grandin’s Kissinger’s Shadow. Grandin, a historian at New York University, contends that Kissinger has left us with war as an instrument of policy, less as a last resort than as a kind of peacock’s strut. “Kissinger taught that there was no such thing as stasis in international affairs,” Grandin writes. “[G]reat states are always either gaining or losing influence, which means that the balance of power has to be constantly tested through gesture and deed.” (He quotes Kissinger as asking a fellow cabinet member, “Can’t we overthrow one of the sheikhs just to show that we can do it?”) The abiding concern driving Kissinger’s foreign policy was therefore maintaining credibility: action to avoid the appearance of inability to act. Hence, Grandin persuasively argues, the bombing of Cambodia is Kissinger’s signature policy, supported as it was by a self-perpetuating justification. Kissinger helped scupper the Paris peace talks in 1968, and then when the talks were set to resume, the United States needed to show its resolve—so it began bombing Cambodia. In secret.

Secrecy is very much a part of Kissinger’s legacy. His systematic efforts to keep the war in Cambodia from becoming public—false records, wiretaps, blatant lies told to Congress—are much more disturbing than the fourth-rate jiggery-pokery of Watergate. Ferguson downplays this too, projecting his disagreement by writing disdainfully that “we are told” Kissinger loved secrecy. Perhaps Ferguson could prove his point by finding the client list of Kissinger Associates, the business consultancy that facilitates relationships between corporations and governments, often in the world’s nastiest places. Sometimes diplomacy requires secrecy, as when Kissinger took elaborate steps to hide his advance visits to China in preparation for Nixon’s historic meeting with Mao. But sometimes secrecy merely serves domestic political purposes—and sometimes it lubricates the accumulation of power. By the time Secretary of State William Rogers learned that Kissinger was conducting the nation’s foreign policy without even notifying his department, it was too late to stop him.

It would be unfair to discuss Kissinger’s legacy without mentioning his triumphs: the opening to China, nuclear nonproliferation agreements, and diplomacy in the Middle East during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Yet I suspect the abiding image of Kissinger will come from Hitchens, who observed Kissinger panicking in 1998 after learning that the federal government planned to release details of Pinochet’s killings and torture—and that this might implicate him. “Sitting in his office at Kissinger Associates, with its tentacles of business and consultancy stretching from Belgrade to Beijing, and cushioned by innumerable other directorships and boards, he still shudders when he hears of the arrest of a dictator.” Realpolitik is ugly business. And for Henry Kissinger, business was good.

The post Restoring Henry appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Relentless Strike:
The Secret History of Joint
Special Operations Command
by Sean Naylor
St. Martin’s Press, 560 pp.

There was something about that combination of people—particularly McRaven—that caused my colleague to whisper, “Something’s up.” I nodded my head and promptly forgot about it. A few weeks later, on May 2, I woke up in the morning to hear that SEAL Team 6 commandos had, in the dead of night, flown into Pakistan in helicopters flown by the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, raided a compound just a few miles away from Pakistan’s elite military academy, and killed Osama bin Laden.

The meeting my colleague and I saw was very likely one of the final planning meetings for the bin Laden operation, code-named Operation Neptune’s Spear. Without question, it was the most spectacular and consequential special operations mission in American history. But as amazing as that operation was, it didn’t seem all that unexpected: the idea that America’s elite commandos could find the world’s most wanted man and deliver long-awaited justice didn’t seem all that extraordinary.

Maybe that shouldn’t surprise us. After all, America has been very publicly at war for fourteen years—from the cities and deserts of Iraq to the mountains of Afghanistan. We have become accustomed to daring tales of brave men and women in uniform performing extraordinary military operations. There is an industry of sorts that, in print and film, tells the stories of units like the SEALs, Delta Force, and the Green Berets. What was once the realm of the so-called “quiet professionals”—those tough commandos who warred in the shadows—isn’t so quiet anymore.

These days we hear about aggressive special operations missions inside Syria, Somalia, and Yemen, and hints of activity elsewhere in the world. The top-secret operation in June 2014 to rescue three American hostages in ISIS-controlled eastern Syria was described in detail by the Washington Post—with White House officials commenting on the record—just a few months later. This reflects the modern media environment, but it also reflects the fact that while America’s overall “boots on the ground” presence may be declining, our special operations forces have become the dominant way to engage our enemies around the world.

While any number of “tell all” books by former special operators (or Hollywood adaptations) can give some flavor to this shadowy world, Sean Naylor’s Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command comes the closest to providing the complete story of how America’s premier special operations units have grown more effective, integrated, and powerful since their formation in the later decades of the Cold War.

Naylor, a well-known military reporter for the Army Times and now at Foreign Policy, is among the few journalists who have covered special operations forces almost exclusively. His last book, Not a Good Day to Die, explored Operation Anaconda, a defining battle against the Taliban and elements of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in March 2002.

Relentless Strike tells the story of JSOC, the component of the U.S. Special Operations Command that focuses on “direct action” missions—those operations designed to capture or kill terrorists. Naylor begins with Operation Eagle Claw, in a remote staging area in Iran code-named Desert One, where, on April 24, 1980, elite Delta Force commandos were refueling helicopters during an attempt to rescue fifty-two American hostages in Tehran. The ad hoc nature of the mission—with a variety of units who had rarely worked together—contributed to disaster, when a helicopter collided with a plane full of fuel and Delta Force soldiers, killing eight of them.

The Desert One humiliation spurred an intense, decades-long focus on improving America’s ability to rapidly deploy highly trained commandos and their supporting military and intelligence community partners anywhere in the world to perform a wide variety of missions. This is the story Naylor tells so well in Relentless Strike.

The 560-page book is replete with descriptions of dozens of operations, hundreds of interviews by named and unnamed sources, and all the intrigue one would expect from the stories of America’s most highly classified and secretive military units. Naylor organizes the book pretty much as a straight narrative stretching from Eagle Claw in 1980 to Neptune’s Spear in 2011; while this format doesn’t make it easy for the reader to glean many overarching insights, it’s possible to take away a few.

First, the focus of JSOC has depended, unsurprisingly, on the security environment that exists at any given time. In its early years, it focused on fairly large “raiding missions”—dramatic hostage-rescue missions and larger strike forces designed for operations in places like Grenada, Panama, and in Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War. After the fall of the Soviet Union, JSOC focused primarily on countering the spread of weapons of mass destruction, including building very sophisticated units with high-tech drilling and breaching equipment designed to penetrate underground nuclear weapons complexes. After the 9/11 attacks, JSOC shifted its focus to counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. In one of the more interesting descriptions of this period, Naylor captures the debate inside the special operations community about how focused they ought to be on the counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and then Iraq, and whether concentrating on these theaters posed too great a risk that the U.S. would be unprepared for other global crises. It’s the kind of debate that goes on in the Pentagon constantly—how to deal with the demands of today while training for the challenges tomorrow might bring.

Second, it’s hard to read Relentless Strike without marveling at how much the evolution of technology has changed the way in which special operations missions are planned and conducted. In particular, the former JSOC commander General Stanley McCrystal comes across as especially talented at understanding the value of employing fast-evolving technologies like unmanned drones, social networking, mapping software, and so-called “big data” analysis, all of which were just starting to truly come into their own in the 2003-2008 period in which McCrystal commanded JSOC. U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) has fairly unique authority, compared to the conventional forces, to purchase commercial technologies quickly, experiment with them, and employ them. Sometimes in defense circles the tension between investing in personnel versus investing in technologies can result in arguments for prioritizing one over the other. What Relentless Strike seems to prove is that investing and using both is the key to continued success on the current and future battlefields.

Third, the implications of an organization like JSOC, what Naylor calls “an information age warfighting machine,” are yet to be fully understood. There is much debate about drones and the consequences of the proliferation of advanced robotic systems, but there is less debate about how to use America’s elite forces as the counterterrorism struggles continue in the Middle East and beyond. There are descriptions of what amount to assassination campaigns in Relentless Strike that, if true, feel close to being inappropriate (for instance, employing precise car bombs in Iraq to kill high-level insurgents and terrorists). “It’s a great tool,” Naylor quotes a SEAL on the use of the bombing method, “but as many of us have said—hey, we’re no different than the enemy if we’re just blowing up people with booby traps.” As JSOC and special operations forces continue to be the preferred way to target America’s enemies, a broader discussion about the use of force and thresholds for undertaking what amounts to a perpetual war deserve more fulsome debate.

Relentless Strike is likely the best definitive history of how America’s special operations community rose like a Phoenix from the ashes of the Desert One fiasco to become the most capable elite fighting force in the world. Naylor could have done a bit more to craft these stories together into more of an accessible narrative arc, but in fact he may have chosen the better course: to bring this information together for the first time, tell the stories—warts and all—and challenge his readers to come to their own conclusions.

Reading the book reminded me of seeing Vice Admiral McRaven at the White House that day in 2011; the fact that Obama was willing to risk his presidency on the competency and professionalism of the commandos is proof of how far JSOC and the broader special operations forces have come. It speaks well of the president that he was willing to approve the mission, but it speaks more of those who planned and executed it, and of the many thousands who have worked over decades to hone JSOC into the sharpest of spears.

The post The Sharpest Spear appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In early June, California labor regulators ruled that a driver for Uber, the app-based car service, was, in fact, an employee, not an independent contractor, and deserved back pay. The decision made national news, with experts predicting a coming flood of lawsuits. Two weeks later, FedEx agreed to a $288 million settlement after a federal appeals court ruled that the company had shortchanged 2,300 California delivery drivers on pay and benefits by improperly labeling them as independent contractors. The next month, the company lost another case in a federal appeals court over misclassifying 500 delivery drivers in Kansas. Meanwhile, since January, trucking firms operating out of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have lost two major court battles with drivers who claim that they, too, have been robbed of wages by being misclassified as independent contractors.

If you think you notice a pattern here, you’re right. After years of inertia, courts and regulators are starting to take on companies that miscategorize employees as contractors in order to avoid wage and benefit costs. With inequality and the declining middle class becoming major issues in the 2016 presidential race, politicians (at least on the Democratic side) are now also vowing to do something about the plight of contingent workers. “I’ll crack down on bosses who exploit employees by misclassifying them as contractors or even steal their wages,” Hillary Clinton said in her big economic policy speech in July.

The ranks of this “contingent workforce”—defined as temporary and part-time workers and independent contractors—have been growing for decades. From 2006 to 2010, their numbers swelled from 35.3 percent of the employed to 40.4 percent, according to data from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. This trend isn’t altogether bad. Plenty of part-timers, freelancers, and contractors prefer the freedom that comes from itinerant and independent work. And such work is often the result of innovations that lower barriers to entry in otherwise closed markets—the way Uber’s app, for instance, allows amateurs with cars to compete with licensed taxi drivers and owners. The problem is that such arrangements can lead to exploitation: in their winning lawsuit, for example, the California FedEx drivers complained that the company shifted hundreds of millions of dollars in costs onto them, from buying and maintaining their FedEx-branded trucks to following FedEx schedules that didn’t allow for meal breaks and overtime. Not surprisingly, contingent workers in general report lower job satisfaction, lower pay per hour, and fewer fringe benefits than workers in the same industries with more traditional employment, according to the GAO.

Less-skilled workers—truck drivers, hotel maids, office temps—typically bear the brunt of these contingent arrangements, but the practice is also moving into the professional classes. Thanks to a glut of law school grads and a slumping legal business, the number of attorneys working part-time has grown from 2.4 percent in 1994 to 6.1 percent in 2013. Other educated professions, from architecture to mainstream journalism, have seen similar shifts.

Nowhere has the up-classing of contingency work gone farther, ironically, than in one of the most educated and (back in the day) secure sectors of the workforce: college teachers. In 1969, almost 80 percent of college faculty members were tenure or tenure track. Today, the numbers have essentially flipped, with two-thirds of faculty now non-tenure and half of those working only part-time, often with several different teaching jobs.

Why this should be so is not immediately obvious. Unlike the legal and the traditional news industries, higher education has been booming in recent years. Nor does higher ed seem to follow the pattern of other industries being transformed by contingent employment. In his book The Fissured Workplace, David Weil of the Boston University School of Management (and currently the administrator of the U.S. Wage and Hour Division in the U.S. Department of Labor) writes that the growth of contingent employment is being driven mostly by firms focusing on their core businesses and outsourcing the rest of the work to contractors. But teaching students is—or at least is supposed to be—the core mission of higher education. That colleges and universities have turned more and more of their frontline employees into part-time contractors suggests how far they have drifted from what they say they are all about (teaching students) to what they are increasingly all about (conducting research, running sports franchises, or, among for-profits, delivering shareholder value).

To be sure, the old tenure system has its problems, and the rise of the contingent professoriate has its advantages—chief among them allowing fresh teaching talent into the higher education system, often people with more real-world experience than the regular faculty. The problem is that universities are using their power in ways that shortchange both contingent teachers and, ultimately, students. With courts and politicians increasingly questioning the fairness and legality of contingent work in industries like transportation, institutions of higher learning could soon be facing scrutiny, too.

Some trace the practice of hiring part-time instructors to a time when most schools didn’t allow women as full professors, and thus adjunct positions were associated with female instructors from the start. Eileen Schell, author of Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Instruction, notes that these contingent faculty members were referred to as “the housewives of higher education.” My parents lived out that exact paradigm. Both professors, my father was full-time and tenured and my mother was originally tenure track until a move accompanying my father got her only a non-tenured position as an “instructor” as part of a “package” created to lure my father to Stanford. There my mother worked with a cohort of part-time faculty wives who were given little respect and even less in wages. Women still make up the majority of contingent teachers, with estimates as high as 61 percent (by contrast, 59 percent of full-time tenured faculty are men).

A neighbor of mine, Mitch Tropin, teaches at six different colleges in the D.C. area. Through a combination of perseverance and good karma, he has been able to align his three Baltimore schools so he teaches there on the same days, allowing him to minimize commuting time. He always aims for employment at six schools because, he says, “You never know when a class will be canceled or a full-time professor will bump you at the last minute. Sometimes classes just disappear.” Another D.C. adjunct, Tanya Paperny, who doesn’t have a car, has done her commute by bike and public transportation, making her days stretch to thirteen hours.

To say that these are low-wage jobs is an understatement. Based on data from the American Community Survey, 31 percent of part-time faculty are living near or below the federal poverty line. And, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center, one in four families of part-time faculty are enrolled in at least one public assistance program like food stamps and Medicaid or qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit. Known as the “Homeless Prof,” Mary-Faith Cerasoli teaches romance languages and prepares her courses in friends’ apartments when she can crash on a couch, or in her car when the friends can’t take her in. When a student asked to meet with her during office hours, she responded, “Sure, it’s the Pontiac Vibe parked on Stewart Avenue.”

Naomi Winterfalcon, who teaches at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, is happy that she was able to get another job this year and stay off food stamps for the summer. Insultingly, the college gave teachers a flyer, she told me, that said, “Adjuncts, you do get benefits—if you bring your own mug you get coffee and you get 10 percent discounts at the bookstore.” A recent study shows that a large portion of universities and colleges limit their adjuncts’ teaching hours to avoid having to provide the health insurance now required for full-timers under the Affordable Care Act.

But apart from feeling sorry for the underpaid faculty, why should we care that college professors have the same job conditions as day laborers, fast-food workers, cashiers, taxi drivers, or home care aides? They did, after all, choose to pursue a career in higher ed. Administrators at these institutions of higher learning argue that they need to use adjuncts because it is the only way to keep tuition from rising even faster than it has. And isn’t access to education the higher good?

If the rationale for using low-wage professorial labor is affordable college, however, it hasn’t worked. Tuition increases inspire awe at their size—public universities cost three times what they cost in 1980, private universities twice as much. As universities have added amenities like squash courts and luxury dorms, their spending has increased threefold, but the student-teacher ratio remains the same as it was in the past. If you think these tuition increases resulted from an investment in providing a better education for the students in the classroom, consider the growth in administrative staff and administrative pay.

Even while keeping funding for instruction relatively flat, universities increased the number of administrator positions by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, ten times the rate at which they added tenured positions. In the old days, different professors would take their turn as dean for this or that and then happily escape back to scholarship and teaching. Now the administration exists as an end in itself and a career path disconnected from the faculty and pursuit of knowledge. Writing a few years ago for this publication, the Johns Hopkins professor Benjamin Ginsberg described colleges and universities as now being “filled with armies of functionaries—vice presidents, associate vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, provosts, associate provosts, vice provosts, deans, deanlets, and deanlings, all of whom command staffers and assistants—who, more and more, direct the operations of every school.” So while college tuition surged from 2003 to 2013 by 94 percent at public institutions and 74 percent at private, nonprofit schools, and student debt has climbed to over $1.2 trillion, much of that money has been going to ensure higher pay for a burgeoning legion of bureaucrats.

As administrators make more and more faculty positions part-time, allegedly for cost savings, they don’t apply that same logic to themselves. While the part-time professor is now the norm, the percentage of part-time administrators has actually gone down. Their salaries, too, unlike those of professors, continue to go up, increasing by 50 percent between 1998 and 2003 even while tuition was going up and faculty numbers were going down. Estimates put the increase in average salaries for CEOs at public institutions at 75 percent between 1978 and 2013 and at 170 percent at private institutions. As Ginsberg reported, “[I]n January 2009, facing $19 million in budget cuts and a hiring freeze, Florida Atlantic University awarded raises of 10 percent or more to top administrators, including the school’s president.”

Even if the cost of a college education weren’t increasing, the amount of the money in the budget for non-classroom-related activities would have a negative effect. In 2013, colleges and universities devoted less than a third of their revenue to instruction, and, in 2011, at the end of the recession, despite growth in revenue, public and private research universities cropped their education-related spending. One adjunct teacher, JJ, posting a comment online, calculated his/her pay as an adjunct as $65 per student per semester, adding up to the princely sum of $2,000, noting that “each student paid $45,000 in tuition and took about 4 classes a semester.… I think their parents would be rather upset to learn that only $65 of the $45,000 went to pay one professor for an entire semester.”

Of course, what parents really care about is whether their students are benefiting from the money they’re spending. So the real question is whether the shift to adjunct teaching has helped or hurt education outcomes. That turns out to be a hard question to answer definitively, because comprehensive data on student outcomes is hard to come by and the variety among adjuncts (part-time, full-time, graduate students, and so on) and schools (selective schools, open admissions schools) makes comparisons difficult without good data. According to some research, adjuncts get high marks. One study found that freshmen at Northwestern University learned more in introductory classes taught by non-tenured faculty. Another study, of a public four-year school in Ohio, showed that students who took science and engineering classes from adjuncts were more likely to take more classes in those fields, especially if the adjuncts were older (the authors theorized that the real-world industry experience of these older instructors may have captured the students’ imaginations).

Other research, however, points strongly in the opposite direction. A study of community college students found that those who had more exposure to part-time teachers were less likely to transfer to four-year universities. Another detailed study of six public universities within one state found that at four of those schools, freshmen who had more time with part-time faculty were substantially less likely to return sophomore year. Interestingly, however, at the other two universities in that state, freshmen with higher exposure to part-time teachers were slightly more likely to persist to sophomore year. The difference, the researchers discovered, is that these two schools gave their part-time instructors more support, including them, for instance, in new faculty orientation programs.

This last finding gets to the larger point. As a class, adjuncts probably aren’t any worse at teaching than tenured professors (who, for the most part, aren’t hired for their teaching ability). What seems to make a difference is how adjuncts are treated. At most schools, adjuncts simply aren’t getting the tools, training, support, or even status that they need to do their job. Mary Grabar, who worked as an adjunct for many years, sums it up:

Consider the harried part-timer pulling her cart from the car to the “office.” This was necessary, for in most places one could expect at most part of a file drawer for storage, or if she had some seniority among adjuncts, a small locker for her coat and papers next to a cubicle in the hallway near the regular faculty offices. At the state university we had one large room called “The Bullpen.” It contained cast-off desks and chairs. If your office hour happened to not be at a popular time, you would be lucky and get a place to sit, along with a chair for your student. I seemed to get the desk with the worst chair, one which required a delicate balancing act, as it wobbled precipitously. There was certainly no leaning back into a reverie about the poetry I was about to teach! That was too dangerous.

And Grabar says she certainly didn’t have much time to spare for students with similar reveries, or students who simply had questions.

With contracts that last only a semester, adjuncts are hard-pressed to do more than just find the next term’s job—updating their courses, mentoring students, and writing letters of recommendation has to come out of time in which they are writing their own applications or traveling across town to teach at campus number three. As JJ commented, “Did making so little money affect my job performance? Yes. I missed a week of class once due to being hospitalized for stress and exhaustion. Working 40-50 [hours a week] for a grand total of $4000 over four months . . . working extra jobs on top of that to cover my rent and to buy my health insurance and taking other extra jobs to cover my student loans nearly killed me.”

The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success, based at the University of Southern California, studies the recruitment and hiring process for adjunct instructors. Adjuncts are often hired just days before a class begins, giving them little time for preparation or orientation to the school, the students, or the policies on grading and faculty-student interaction.

My neighbor Mitch Tropin argues that “the problem is that most adjuncts do a good job, but are put in an unfair situation.” In addition to poverty wages, long hours, and lack of office space, the isolation from other teachers can be a real problem. Naomi Winterfalcon at Champlain College told me that she knew few people in her department until the adjunct instructors unionized. Champlain, she explains, uses “lots of adjuncts,” but she had never met most of them, even those in her department. Once they organized, however, they began to meet each other in union meetings. “It makes a big difference if you are able to talk to each other. It allows us to improve ourselves academically as well as our working environment,” she says, and it “facilitates better teaching to have others who are in the same circumstances to talk through problems, share experiences, and strategize how to solve them.” Champlain itself has done nothing to support the adjuncts’ efforts to integrate into the faculty.

What makes the situation even worse is that adjuncts are often disproportionately assigned the courses filled with the students who need the most assistance, such as introductory courses, freshman writing classes, or remedial education. Incoming students often need basic grammar and composition skills, which requires the kind of intensive hands-on teaching that is difficult for a part-timer with full-time teaching hours and insufficient support to provide.

And there’s a more subtle danger lurking in contingency: with no job security, precarious financial situations, and weak institutional support, adjunct professors may lack the independence and status they need to challenge students by presenting unpopular positions, critiquing commonly accepted ideas, or even giving out poor grades. Academic freedom doesn’t mean much in these circumstances. And while we tend to see academic freedom as protection for provocative scholarship, it also performs the even more important function of facilitating discussion and debate in the classroom. Greg Lukianoff, the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, finds the potential for censorship and self-censorship in the adjunct system “troubling,” and adds, “I think at minimum adjuncts should have contracts with both terms of several years and promises of academic freedom.”

When professors know that students’ assessments may be the only evaluation they receive and thus are the most significant factor in whether they will be hired for another semester, they have little incentive to grade critically and instead may grade to please, resulting in grade inflation and permissiveness of students’ wrong-headed ideas or disruptive behavior. The system gives students leverage to attack a teacher they may not like or to avoid the consequences of their own academic failure.

Tenure also has its critics, and not without reason. Compelling arguments that the decisionmaking process is opaque, allowing bias to go undetected, and that safeguarding positions allows dead-wood professors to keep their positions, all make tenure worth a critical second look. My father’s experience reflected the upsides of the old regime: a young professor moves laterally to get a tenure-track position, gets tenure, and then jumps again for more prestige, in my father’s case an endowed chair. He had an office, kept office hours, prepared his own curriculum, was invited to faculty seminars and programs on pedagogical advances, and had staff support and other resources so he could focus on teaching and scholarship rather than on seeking the next opening to teach a course and driving between campuses. My father served as mentor, emotional support, and intellectual guide for several generations of young scholars, while at the same time pursuing his own cutting-edge scholarship. Even among those academics who didn’t share this trajectory, 80 percent were still full-time and eligible for tenure. While there are still professors who enjoy the benefits of tenure and the emoluments that go along with that status, many of their colleagues make up the proletariat of the ivory tower, with no hope of advancement, abysmal wages, and no job security.

Some adjuncts are refusing to accept the status quo. Across the country, many of them have turned to the Service Employees International Union, the United Autoworkers, the American Federation of Teachers, and other unions to improve their lot. Mary-Faith Cerasoli attends rallies in her “Homeless Prof” vest. In D.C., the SEIU, led by adjuncts including Mitch Tropin, has successfully pushed for contracts at American University, Howard, Georgetown, George Washington, Montgomery College, and, just recently, at Trinity, meaning that the majority of adjuncts in the D.C. area are now represented by the union. Fighting under the banner of the “Fight for $15,” like fast-food workers, they argue that they should be paid $15,000 per course—which would equal $90,000 annually for a professor with three courses per semester. (Given that the American Association of University Professors estimates the average earnings for assistant professors at $62,500 to $76,900 and for associate professors at $75,220 to $91,200, this figure is truly aspirational at this point.) While some schools like Georgetown have accepted unions without too much fuss, others have adopted the tactics long used by anti-labor businesses: falsely accusing labor officials of earning exorbitant salaries, hiring law firms that specialize in union busting, and firing those involved in the campaign. But many adjuncts are committed to the fight. Tiffany Kraft, who teaches at four different institutions in the Portland, Oregon, area says, “What do we have to lose? We’ve been scared into complicity for so long, but I didn’t go through fourteen years of higher education to be treated like shit.”

Traditional higher-learning institutions face another threat besides unions and online competition, in the form of lawsuits. The Delphi Project’s Adrianna Kezar calls on university boards to exercise oversight. Writing in Trusteeship magazine for the Association of Governing Boards, she recommends that colleges and universities examine their use of adjuncts, because over-reliance on contingent teachers may place “their institutions at greater risk of becoming involved in a class-action lawsuit related to their employment practices.” With courses that need to be taught every semester led by an interchangeable set of adjuncts, the schools seem to be doing just what trucking companies, housecleaning services, and now app-driven businesses like Uber and Lyft have been accused of doing: misclassifying workers as contractors. Especially when a teacher is asked to carry out similar responsibilities as full-time permanent staff but for less than half the salary, there may be grounds to believe that universities and colleges are evading their legal obligations as employers. And with the overrepresentation of women in these jobs, it seems possible that many of these universities could be violating not only labor laws but civil rights laws as well. Alyssa Colton, for example, the subject of an NBC News story earlier this year, was hired initially as a full-time teacher with benefits at the College of St. Rose in Albany, New York. The college did not renew her contract four years later, but after a semester had gone by, it rehired her as a part-time instructor without health insurance or pension contributions. “I essentially took a pay cut,” Colton told NBC, “doing the same work for less money and less respect.” Because her husband’s business had failed a couple years before, Colton’s move from full-time employee to adjunct meant that the family had to go on food stamps and Medicaid, and they now qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Kezar fears that there is no going back to my father’s era, when most positions were tenured or tenure track. Instead, she favors simply adopting longer contracts with benefits, which would bridge the gap between the tenured faculty and the rest of the instructors. At Georgetown, the so-called “half-fulls” are paid a rate proportional to the full-timers and have some measure of job security.

If you have any doubt that colleges can treat frontline educators well and still deliver quality instruction at a reasonable price, consider Western Governors University. As this magazine detailed in its September/October 2011 issue, Western Governors is a nonprofit online institution that has discovered a way to provide accredited college degrees at a fraction of the cost of their competitors. What’s remarkable is that they’ve done this using a workforce that provides students with academic coaching and mentoring from home offices and kitchen tables across the country and yet enjoys full-time hours and good benefits. Clearly, it’s possible to deliver a quality product at a relatively low cost while still paying your educators fairly.

One way or another, something has to give. Judges and regulators are taking a harder look at companies that misclassify their workers as contractors, and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton is promising to crack down hard on the practice. Unions are moving in to organize adjuncts, with some success. And pressure continues to build on the higher education sector to allow the federal government to collect data on student outcomes. That’s the single best way to provide policymakers as well as colleges and universities with the data they need to determine which kinds of instructors (tenured or adjunct, part-time or full-time) serve which group of students best, and what kinds of support (training, office hours, wages) they need to do their jobs.

In the end, it may all come down to results. By creating an inferior product that is too expensive and doesn’t satisfy students, parents, employers, or academics, traditional institutions are either going to change how they’re doing things voluntarily and proactively or they’ll be forced into it by innovative competitors, and legislators, regulators, and the courts.

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The Best Bang for the Buck lists are presented for five different geographic regions:

Northeast: CT, DE, MA, MD, ME, NH, NJ, NY, PA, RI, VT
Midwest: IA, IL, IN, KS, MI, MN, MO, ND, NE, OH, SD, WI
Southeast: AL, DC, FL, GA, NC, SC, VA, WV
South: AR, KY, LA, MS, OK, TN, TX
West: AK, AZ, CA, CO, HI, ID, MT, NM, NV, OR, UT, WA, WY

The five measures used in the ratings are the following:

(1) Student loan default rate. This measure uses the average two-year default rate from the 2008-09 through 2010-11 academic years. This data comes with one substantial limitation: for some university systems, default rates are reported at the system level instead of the institutional level. In these cases, each college was assigned the reported value for the system, although this may not accurately reflect default rates. For example, Rutgers reported a 4.9 percent default rate; it’s probably the case that the branch campuses in Newark and Camden have more defaults than the main campus in New Brunswick, but that cannot be discerned in the data. Colleges received three points for an average default rate below 3 percent, two points for a rate between 3 percent and 6 percent, one point for a rate between 6 percent and 9 percent, and no points for a rate above 9 percent. Four colleges did not report default rates, and were given a score of zero points on this measure.

(2) Graduation rate. This measure uses the average six-year institutional graduation rate for first-time, full-time students from 2010 through 2012. Colleges received three points for an average graduation rate above 70 percent, two points for a rate between 50 percent and 70 percent, one point for a rate between 30 percent and 50 percent, and no points for a rate below 30 percent.

(3) Graduation rate performance. The predicted graduation rate measure is based on research by Robert Kelchen, assistant professor in the Department of Education Leadership, Management and Policy at Seton Hall University and methodologist for the annual college guide, and Douglas N. Harris, associate professor at Tulane University. The graduation rate prediction formula uses data from 2010 to 2012 and includes the percentage of Pell Grant recipients and students receiving student loans, the average ACT/SAT score, the admit rate, the racial/ethnic and gender makeup of the student body, the number of students (overall and full-time), and institutional characteristics such as whether a college is primarily residential. We estimated this predicted graduation rate measure in a regression model separately by degree classification (research, master’s, baccalaureate, and liberal arts), imputing for missing data when necessary. Schools with graduation rates that are higher than the “average” school with similar stats score better than schools that match or, worse, undershoot the mark. Two colleges, the California Institute of Technology and Harvey Mudd College, had predicted graduation rates of just over 100 percent. We adjusted these predicted graduation rates to 100 percent. Colleges received three points if they outperformed their predicted graduation rate by at least 5 percent, two points if they outperformed by less than 5 percent, one point if they underperformed by less than 5 percent, and no points if they underperformed by more than 5 percent.

(4) Percent Pell Grant students. This measure uses the percentage of undergraduates receiving Pell Grants in the 2009-10 through 2011-12 academic years as a proxy for a college’s effort in serving a socioeconomically diverse population. Colleges received three points for having at least 50 percent of students receiving Pell Grants, two points for between 35 percent and 50 percent Pell, one point for between 20 percent and 35 percent Pell, and no points for being less than 20 percent Pell.

(5) Net price of attendance. This measure reflects the average price for the 2009-10 through 2011-12 academic years (tuition, fees, room and board, and other expenses minus any grant aid received) that students receiving any grant aid from the institution, state, and/or federal government should expect to pay for college. (This does not include students who do not receive any grant aid, but it’s arguable that we don’t care as much about the prices these students pay since they are primarily from higher income families.) Colleges received three points for a net price under 10,000, two points for a net price between 10,000 and 15,000, one point for a net price between 15,000 and 20,000, and no points for a net price above 20,000.

Scoring system. Colleges received a score from zero to fifteen points by adding together their scores on all five of the above measures. Colleges that received the same score are ranked by the net price of attendance. —Eds.

The post A Note on Methodology: Best-Bang-for-the-Buck Rankings appeared first on Washington Monthly.

To establish the set of colleges included in the rankings, we started with the 1,727 colleges in the fifty states that are listed in the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System as having a Carnegie basic classification of research, master’s, baccalaureate, and baccalaureate/associate’s colleges, are not exclusively graduate schools, and participate in federal financial aid programs. We then excluded 134 baccalaureate and baccalaureate/associate’s-level colleges that reported that at least half of the undergraduate degrees awarded in 2012 were below the bachelor’s degree level, as well as eleven colleges with fewer than 100 undergraduate students in fall 2012. Next, we decided to exclude the five federal military academies (Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Merchant Marine, and Navy) because their unique missions make them difficult to evaluate using our methodology. Our rankings are based in part on the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants and the percentage of students enrolled in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), whereas the service academies provide all students with free tuition (and thus no Pell Grants) and commission graduates as officers in the armed services (and thus not the ROTC program). Our final set of exclusions was to not rank colleges that had not reported data on the three main measures used in the social mobility section (percent Pell, graduation rate, and net price) at least once in the past three years. This resulted in a final sample of 1,540 colleges and includes public, private nonprofit, and for-profit colleges.

The primary change in this year’s rankings is the use of the three most recent years of data (each equally weighted) instead of the most recent year of data, as we had done in the past. This helps reduce wild swings in rankings, particularly at smaller colleges where a few more students graduating or defaulting on their student loans would have substantial implications for their rankings. Using the average of multiple years would hurt the ranking position of colleges that have exhibited rapid improvements in their outcomes, but the truth is that few colleges can move the dial this quickly. This will reduce size of the year-to-year changes in a college’s rankings going forward, which may sell fewer magazines but paints a more accurate picture of performance.

Each of our three categories (service, research, and social mobility) includes several components. We have determined the community service score by measuring each school’s performance in five different areas: the size of each school’s Air Force, Army, and Navy ROTC programs, relative to the size of the school; the number of alumni currently serving in the Peace Corps, relative to the size of the school; the percentage of federal work-study grant money spent on community service projects; a combined score based on the number of students participating in community service and total service hours performed, both relative to school size; and a combined score based on the number of full-time staff supporting community service, relative to the total number of staff, the number of academic courses that incorporate service, relative to school size, and whether the institution provides scholarships for community service.

The latter two measures are based on data reported to the Corporation for National and Community Service by colleges and universities in their applications for the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll (data is available for 2011 and 2012, but not 2013—making this the only set of measures where two years of data were used instead of three). The first is a measure of student participation in community service, and the second is a measure of institutional support for service. Colleges that did not submit applications in a given year had no data and were given zeros on these measures. (Our advice to those schools: If you care about service, believe you do a good job of promoting it, and want the world to know, then fill out the application!)

The research score for national universities is also based on five measurements: the total amount of an institution’s research spending (from the Center for Measuring University Performance and the National Science Foundation); the number of science and engineering PhDs awarded by the university; the number of undergraduate alumni who have gone on to receive a PhD in any subject, relative to the size of the school; the number of faculty receiving prestigious awards, relative to the number of full-time faculty; and the number of faculty in the National Academies, relative to the number of full-time faculty. For national universities, we weighted each of these components equally to determine a school’s final score in the category. For liberal arts colleges, master’s universities, and baccalaureate colleges, which do not have extensive doctoral programs, science and engineering PhDs were excluded and we gave double weight to the number of alumni who go on to get PhDs. Faculty awards and National Academy membership were not included in the research score for these institutions because such data is available for only a relative handful of these schools.

As some readers have pointed out in previous years, our research score rewards large schools for their size. This is intentional. It is the huge numbers of scientists, engineers, and PhDs that larger universities produce, combined with their enormous amounts of research spending, that will help keep America competitive in an increasingly global economy. But the two measures of university research quality—faculty awards and National Academy members, relative to the number of full-time faculty (from the Center for Measuring University Performance)—are independent of a school’s size.

The social mobility score is more complicated. We have data from the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System survey that tells us the percentage of a school’s students receiving Pell Grants, which is a good measure of a school’s commitment to educating lower-income students. We’d like to know how many of these Pell Grant recipients graduate, but schools aren’t required to report those figures. Still, because lower-income students at any school are less likely to graduate than wealthier ones, the percentage of Pell Grant recipients is a meaningful indicator in and of itself. If a campus has a large percentage of Pell Grant students—that is to say, if its student body is disproportionately poor—it will tend to diminish the school’s overall graduation rate.

We first predicted the percentage of students on Pell Grants based on the average ACT/SAT score and the percentage of students admitted. This indicated which selective universities (since selectivity is highly correlated with ACT/SAT scores and admit rates) are making the effort to enroll low-income students. (Since most schools only provide the twenty-fifth percentile and the seventy-fifth percentile of scores, we took the mean of the two. For schools where a majority of students took the SAT, we converted SAT scores into ACT equivalents.)

The predicted graduation rate measure is based on research by Robert Kelchen, assistant professor in the Department of Education Leadership, Management and Policy at Seton Hall University and methodologist for this year’s college guide, and Douglas N. Harris, associate professor at Tulane University. In addition to the percentage of Pell recipients and the average ACT/SAT score, the graduation rate prediction formula includes the percentage of students receiving student loans, the admit rate, the racial/ethnic and gender makeup of the student body, the number of students (overall and full-time), and institutional characteristics such as whether a college is primarily residential. We estimated this predicted graduation rate measure in a regression model separately for each classification using average data from the last three years, imputing for missing data when necessary. Schools with graduation rates that are higher than the “average” school with similar stats score better than schools that match or, worse, undershoot the mark. Two colleges, the California Institute of Technology and Harvey Mudd College, had predicted graduation rates of just over 100 percent. We adjusted these predicted graduation rates to 100 percent.

We then divided the difference between the actual and predicted graduation rate by the net price of attendance, defined as the average price that first-time, full-time students who receive financial aid pay for college after subtracting need-based financial aid. This cost-adjusted graduation rate measure rewards colleges that do a good job of both graduating students and keeping costs low. The two social mobility formulas (actual vs. predicted percent Pell and cost-adjusted graduation rate performance) were weighted equally.

The post A Note on Methodology: 4-Year Colleges and Universities appeared first on Washington Monthly.