Higher education is under a level of scrutiny that the industry has not seen in our lifetimes. The Trump administration’s efforts to take a blowtorch to the U.S. Department of Education and Ivy League institutions are unprecedented, but state governments, foundations, and the general public are demanding that colleges and universities do more to help students complete a quality education with a promising career outlook at a reasonable price tag. And for more than a decade, the Monthly has produced an annual list of Best Bang for the Buck colleges that foster social mobility and serve the public good. We do so again in 2025 to highlight that many colleges are excelling in this key area—but others are failing students and taxpayers in major ways. The rankings are broken down by region, available here. (We used the same data and methodology to create the social mobility portion of the main rankings, Best Colleges for Your Tuition and Tax Dollars; the methodology is explained here.) 

The key takeaway of the rankings is that public higher education systems in some states are engines of social mobility at an affordable price tag. The California State University system occupies nine of the top 11 spots in the West, interrupted only by super-wealthy Stanford University and church-supported Brigham Young University. The City University of New York system placed six colleges in the Northeast top 11, while Columbia, Yale, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins were relegated to spots 12 through 15. 

Public universities in Florida, led by Florida International University and the University of Central Florida, held seven of the top nine positions in the Southeast Best Bang for the Buck Ranking in 2025. Florida higher education is facing substantial leadership questions, but the system has been rock-solid in the past. The University of Texas’s Rio Grande Valley and El Paso campuses were in second and third place in the South, while the University of Illinois Chicago was tops in the Midwest. Regionally focused public universities generally perform well on this list due to their combination of broad access, relatively low tuition, and strong student outcomes. 

There are also a number of access-oriented private nonprofit colleges that performed well on our Best Bang for the Buck Rankings. Berea College in Kentucky maintained its position atop the South, Boricua College was third in the Northeast, and the College of the Ozarks was second in the Midwest. All three of these colleges focus on serving students from lower-income families, and do so well. Some institutions that are currently wealthy (although that may change quickly given actions from the Trump administration and Congress) also perform well for the modest number of lower-income students that they serve. MIT, Princeton, Duke, Rice, Northwestern, and the University of Chicago all finished within the top five in their respective regions. This shows that there are multiple ways to be a Best Bang for the Buck college.

The bottom of each list is dominated by expensive private colleges—both nonprofit and for-profit—that have mediocre completion rates given their student bodies, enroll relatively few Pell recipients, and feature yawning gaps in graduation rates between Pell Grant recipients and non-Pell students. These colleges may deliver value for some students, but individuals should approach these institutions with caution and ask a lot of questions about whether a particular college is right for them. 

Finally, the rapid unscheduled disassembly of the Department of Education’s data infrastructure calls the future of these rankings into question. We are hopeful that logic (or lawsuits) will prevail and that the department will be able to continue producing data to inform students, their families, and the general public. But if not, students are going to have limited information when making one of the largest financial decisions of their lifetimes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Student protesters at college campuses nationwide, united by their outrage at Israel’s actions in Gaza, can rightly be described as diverse. Despite the masks, it’s clear that they come from different racial backgrounds, and their views range from the belief that Israel should give up on its war effort to the conviction that Israel should be destroyed entirely.

But one thing is not especially diverse about the protests: the campuses on which they’ve been happening.

Many of the most high-profile protests have occurred at highly selective colleges, like Columbia University. But since the national media is famously obsessed with these schools and gives far less attention to the thousands of other colleges where most Americans get their postsecondary educations, it’s hard to know how widespread the campus unrest has really been.  

We at the Washington Monthly tried to get to the bottom of this question: Have pro-Palestinian protests taken place disproportionately at elite colleges, where few students come from lower-income families?

The answer is a resounding yes.

Using data from Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium and news reports of encampments, we matched information on every institution of higher education that has had pro-Palestinian protest activity (starting when the war broke out in October until early May) to the colleges in our 2023 college rankings. Of the 1,421 public and private nonprofit colleges that we ranked, 318 have had protests and 123 have had encampments.

By matching that data to percentages of students at each campus who receive Pell Grants (which are awarded to students from moderate- and low-income families), we came to an unsurprising conclusion: Pro-Palestinian protests have been rare at colleges with high percentages of Pell students. Encampments at such colleges have been rarer still. A few outliers exist, such as Cal State Los Angeles, the City College of New York, and Rutgers University–Newark. But in the vast majority of cases, campuses that educate students mostly from working-class backgrounds have not had any protest activity. For example, at the 78 historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) on the Monthly’s list, 64 percent of the students, on average, receive Pell Grants. Yet according to our data, none of those institutions have had encampments and only nine have had protests, a significantly lower rate than non-HBCU schools. 

Protest activity has been common, however, at elite schools with both low acceptance rates and few Pell students. You can see these findings in the chart below.

When you separate out private and public colleges, the difference becomes even more stark, as the next chart demonstrates. At private colleges, protests have been rare, encampments have been rarer, and both have taken place almost exclusively at schools where poorer students are scarce and the listed tuition and fees are exorbitantly high.

Out of the hundreds of private colleges where more than 25 percent of the students receive Pell Grants, only five colleges have had encampments.

Protests and encampments have been more common at public colleges. This is in part because these colleges just have more students, and only a few students are needed for a protest. Even at public colleges, though, there is a clear relationship between having fewer Pell students and having had a protest or encampment, as the chart below illustrates.

Why is it that protests are so concentrated at more elite colleges and rare at those with larger percentages of working-class students? One possible explanation is that the more selective and wealthier colleges attract and encourage students who are more public minded and socially active.

To test that hypothesis, we compared the list of schools that have had protests and encampments to our 2023 rankings of national universities, where the lion’s share of protest activity has happened, based on a set of “service” metrics we use to gauge democratic engagement. These include the number of students at a college who serve—before, during, or after attending the school—in AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, ROTC, and local community nonprofits through work study; the percentage of students registered to vote and the degree to which the school makes student voting easier; and whether a school is listed on the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification, which recognizes colleges that document their broader public engagement efforts.

As you can see in the chart below, schools that have high scores on the Washington Monthly service rankings (the bottom of the Y axis) are a bit more likely to also have had protests and encampments. But in general, the distribution looks more random, especially compared with the previous three charts. In other words, having high levels of student democratic engagement—at least according to the Monthly’s metrics, which are the most extensive we know of—is far less correlated with protests and encampments than admitting low percentages of poor and working-class students.

What, then, does explain why colleges with large numbers of students of modest means are far less likely to have had protests and encampments? Our best guess is that poorer students are just focused on other concerns. They may have off-campus jobs and nearby family members to see and take care of. They might sympathize with the protesters—a nationwide poll of college students in May found that 45 percent support the encampments, 24 percent oppose them, and 30 percent are neutral. But in the same poll, only 13 percent rated conflict in the Middle East as the issue most important to them. That was well behind health care reform (40 percent), educational funding and access (38 percent), and economic fairness and opportunity (37 percent). Students burdened with multiple responsibilities—like having to work a low-paying job to pay for college to get a better-paying job—are unlikely to devote what little free time they have to protesting about an issue they don’t see as a high priority.

There could be other reasons. Some colleges have more of a history and culture of campus protesting, and while colleges are generally left-leaning, some are more so than others. At Columbia, for example, there are 5.6 liberal students for every one conservative student, whereas at the University of Texas at El Paso (where there have been no pro-Palestinian protests or encampments, and 58 percent of students receive Pell Grants), there are only 2.3 liberal students for every conservative student. Many public universities, especially in red states, are also under political pressure to keep a lid on campus protests. Students there and at other institutions, such as evangelical colleges, may fear retaliation for expressing their views on the war.

Whatever the cause, the pattern is clear: Pro-Palestinian protests are overwhelmingly an elite college phenomenon.

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With public confidence in the value of higher education declining and outstanding student debt exceeding $1.5 trillion, policy makers have spent much of the last two decades trying to tackle issues of affordability and accountability. One of the key areas of discussion (and disagreement) has been a once-obscure portion of the Higher Education Act called “gainful employment.” Under that legislation, the Department of Education is allowed to set conditions that vocationally focused programs must meet in order to receive federal financial aid. This covers virtually all programs at for-profit colleges as well as certificate programs at public and private nonprofit institutions.  

Some career training programs are scandalously bad, leaving graduates with no way to repay their loans. Strong standards that force programs to either provide a valuable education or close their doors will protect students and taxpayers from grievous financial harm. 

The Obama administration tried twice to implement gainful employment rules. The first effort, which began in 2009, was struck down by a federal judge in 2012 for not being sufficiently supported by data. The second effort began soon after, and the first set of data on program-level outcomes came out in the final weeks of the Obama administration in early 2017 after going through the full regulatory process and surviving multiple lawsuits. 

My research is on the effects of federal and state higher education accountability policies, and I conducted the first study on the effects of the Obama-era gainful employment effort, tracking whether affected programs and colleges remained open. Even though it was clear by the release of data in 2017 that the Trump administration would not enforce the Obama administration’s rule (which they officially reversed in July 2020), programs that posted a failing score were more likely to close in following years than programs that barely passed. 

With a Democrat back in the White House, efforts to put gainful employment rules back into place quickly resumed. After going back through the complex process of negotiated rulemaking, the Biden administration just released its version of gainful employment, which will take effect in July 2024 (barring successful lawsuits). It was crucial for the administration to release the rule last week due to the possibility of a protracted government shutdown; rules generally must be published by November 1 for them to take effect in the following July. 

How do the Biden administration’s rules compare to the Obama administration’s attempts? The previous gainful employment rule featured a debt-to-earnings ratio that covered programs must pass in order to continue being eligible to receive federal financial aid. This version has the same threshold: a debt-to-earnings ratio of less than 8 percent of annual earnings or 20 percent of earnings above 150 percent of the poverty line. What is new is the addition of an earnings premium test that requires graduates of programs to have earnings of at least the median high school graduate between the ages of 25 and 34. This varies by state, but is roughly $25,000. This flags programs that may not leave students with large amounts of debt, but do little to improve students’ financial well-being.  

The debt-to-earnings ratio is on sound legal footing at this point after having survived previous lawsuits, and it is more important than ever given recent changes that make income-driven repayment plans more generous to borrowers. But I would not be surprised to see the earnings premium metric face multiple legal challenges, particularly from cosmetology programs, where graduates often get a large portion of their earnings in tips that somehow do not get reported as wages. As a taxpayer, I’m not sympathetic to the argument that people are not reporting their full wages and I wrote as much in my 2018 public comments to the Trump administration on the topic.  

Another major change from previous gainful employment efforts is that the Biden administration will be publishing outcomes for all programs with sufficient data (including at public and private nonprofit colleges), not just programs that are covered by gainful employment. In theory, this should be an area of bipartisan support as it combines Democratic interests in consumer protection with Republican interests in market-based accountability. Much of the data is already public through recent improvements to the College Scorecard, but putting a label on programs as “good” or “not good” could theoretically drive student and institutional behaviors. 

The Biden administration standards should help clean up the vocational education marketplace, if they stay in place and if the Department of Education is willing to pull the plug on poor-performing programs. These are regulations issued by the executive branch, not laws passed by Congress. Beyond potential legal challenges, the rules could again be throttled by a change in the White House, as we saw in the Trump administration.  

The final rules should be in place by July 2024, but fresh data from the vocational programs won’t be made public until 2026. Without that data, the federal government can’t shut down failing programs. Therefore, whether students will be protected from choosing the poorest-performing programs may ultimately hinge on the outcome of the next presidential election. 

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Higher education in America is facing its most severe challenges in decades. Enrollment is down, inflation is up,  and Americans are more skeptical than ever that a college degree is worth the time and money needed to earn it. And there are plenty of colleges that do little to counter this narrative, thanks to being bastions of elitism or producing lousy outcomes using hard-earned tuition and tax dollars.

The good news is that there are quite a few colleges that provide a quality education at an affordable price for students with modest economic means. We have been highlighting these colleges for more than a decade in our annual list of Best Bang for the Buck colleges, and we are pleased to share the 2023 version of the rankings. The rankings are broken down by region. (We used the same data and methodology to create the social mobility portion of the main rankings; the methodology is explained here.) 

The Best Bang for the Buck colleges across each of the five regions include a few incredibly wealthy and highly rejective colleges, but they are matched and surpassed by regionally focused public and private colleges that focus on providing value to their students. For example, Vanderbilt University—a national top performer in U.S. News & World Report’s exclusivity-focused college guide—ranked only 10th in the South for graduating and financially supporting the modest number of Pell Grant recipients that it admits. Vanderbilt trails institutions such as Texas A&M International University (57th in U.S. News’s ranking of universities in the West), Sam Houston State University (263rd among national universities in U.S. News), and Grambling State University (99th among U.S. News’s southern universities) that graduate far more Pell recipients and propel them into the middle class.

In the Northeast, the Massachusetts Maritime Academy edged out the University of Pennsylvania and MIT for first place. Two City University of New York campuses made the top 10, sandwiching super-wealthy Princeton. Wade College in Texas was tops in the South (but unranked by U.S. News), closely followed by the longtime Monthly favorite Berea College. In the Southeast, Florida International University topped Washington and Lee University in our rankings while producing nearly 100 times as many Pell graduates each year. (FIU is tied for 151st nationally in U.S. News,which ranks Washington and Lee highly by comparison.) Four public universities in Florida made the top 10, but that might change in the future as Governor Ron DeSantis’s battle against a top-notch higher education system plays out.

In the Midwest, Governors State University takes top honors for far outperforming expectations on graduation rates and earnings of former students. In the West, the list is dominated by California State University campuses yet again, with seven Cal State campuses outperforming ultra-rejective Stanford. 

We only display our top 50 colleges in print. Online, we list the full 200-plus colleges per region. The bottom of the rankings mainly consists of expensive private nonprofit and for-profit colleges with middling student outcomes. Tulane University has been on our shame list for years, and it checks in at last place in the South this year due to relatively poor graduation rates, low post-college earnings, and a high net price. Compare that to its position in U.S. News, which rewarded Tulane with the 44th national spot last year for its research power, low acceptance rate, and hefty endowment. Other low-ranked universities in the Monthly’s college guide with substantial financial resources include the University of Miami, High Point University, Creighton University, and the University of Tulsa.

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Every year, journalists, university administrators, and high school students keenly await the release of the U.S. News & World Report college rankings to see which schools have moved up or down on the lists. This year, the big news was that Columbia University dropped from 2nd to 18th on U.S. News’s ranking of national universities—not for any measurable decline in its quality, but because it had fudged the data it submitted, a fact the university itself now admits.

Columbia isn’t the only school that has recently been caught sending the magazine phony numbers. This summer, U.S. News removed Villanova University from its “Best Value” list for “misreporting” its data. An internal University of Southern California review this past spring confirmed a similar U.S. News numbers-boosting scheme at its education school, and a Temple University business school dean is now serving time in prison for such activity. Other colleges, including Tulane, Claremont McKenna, Emory, and the University of Pennsylvania, have been engulfed in similar scandals over the past decade.

The common source of these controversies is the way U.S. News puts together its metrics. While just about any ranking, college or otherwise, can be gamed, U.S. News relies heavily on proprietary surveys and self-reporting, which gives colleges an especially large incentive to cheat.

The most famous and infamous is a “reputational survey” the magazine sends to college presidents and provosts asking them to rate their fellow colleges. This survey suffers from poor response rates (down to 34 percent this year from 48 percent a decade ago), and leaders have gamed the results for years by rating themselves highly while considering everyone else to be awful.

U.S. News also asks colleges to follow something called the Common Data Set (CDS): definitions and guidelines meant to standardize the reporting of data on class sizes, student-faculty ratios, and a host of other metrics that the federal government does not collect. It’s a worthwhile effort, but compliance is voluntary, and while most colleges participate, some don’t—including, until last month, Columbia University. Moreover, it is hard for U.S. News to validate the accuracy of the data that colleges report.

In addition to the main list of best colleges, U.S. News also ranks professional programs such as law, business, and education schools. All the data for these rankings comes from surveys that U.S. News sends out to the programs, as the federal government collects little information about particular graduate programs of study. Professional schools are under especially immense pressure to climb up the U.S. News rankings. Not surprisingly, these programs are where a lot of the scandals are happening.

The chances of being caught are small because it’s hard, if not impossible, for U.S. News to confirm the data independently. That’s why evidence of misconduct tends to surface only if a school’s numbers appear so implausible that someone launches an investigation or when a university insider blows the whistle, as in Columbia’s case. Since blowing the whistle is itself risky, the likelihood is high that there is a lot more misreporting happening at a lot more colleges than has so far come to light.

The way for a magazine to minimize the chances of manipulation and misreporting is not to rely on hard-to-check proprietary data and instead base rankings on information the federal government collects. That is how the Washington Monthly puts together its annual college rankings—and, not coincidentally, why it has not been embroiled in the kinds of scandals that have bedeviled U.S. News. Federal data is, by definition, public, so easier for outside observers to check. And even though the feds rarely penalize colleges for sending in flawed data, schools know the risk is there. 

That doesn’t mean colleges don’t still try to manipulate the numbers they report to Washington. For instance, to make it seem as if they are serving more lower-income students, selective colleges juke their stats on Pell Grant admissions by letting in lots of students who barely qualify financially. Or they game graduation rates by starting such students in the summer or spring instead of in the fall cohort that the federal government typically uses to calculate graduation rates. But there are ways of correcting for that behavior. For instance, the Washington Monthly calculates actual versus predicted graduation rates that adjust for student characteristics and household incomes. We also use a newer federal graduation rate that includes part-time and transfer students.

Moreover, some of the data the Washington Monthly relies on most—such as how much students earn after they leave college or the degree to which they are paying off their student loans—can’t be manipulated by colleges because the federal government collects it independently via student loan and tax records. Other federal data the Monthly uses, such as the number of ROTC students at a college or the percentage of work-study slots it devotes to community service jobs, can only be “gamed” by colleges doing more of what we want them to do, like encouraging students to serve the country.

Why doesn’t U.S. News base its rankings solely on public data, as the Monthly does? The answer is that the federal government doesn’t collect the numbers U.S. News needs to calculate the qualities its rankings are meant to reward: a college’s wealth, prestige, and exclusivity. As long as those are the values U.S. News chooses to define college excellence, its rankings will be subject to being played.

There is something that Washington can do, however, to partially save U.S. News from itself. The Common Data Set elements like class size and student-faculty ratios are of sufficient interest to the public that the federal government should consider adding them to their annual data collection from colleges. It should combine that with occasional audits of data that colleges provide. Those two steps would add a measure of integrity to the college rankings that millions of prospective students and their families rely on—and perhaps spare the rest of us from having to read so many stories about colleges pulling the wool over U.S. News’s eyes.

The post Why the U.S. News College Rankings Are Subject to Cheating and How to Fix Them appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Although the American economy made it through the first two years of the coronavirus pandemic in surprisingly strong shape, rising inflation and an unpredictable supply chain are stretching the budgets of many families. As the prices of housing, food, gasoline, and other essentials continue to rise faster than household incomes, a college education may end up becoming an important item that families simply cannot afford without taking out large student and parent loans.

Layer mounting skepticism of the value of higher education and growing political polarization on top of financial concerns for many families, and it becomes more crucial than ever for colleges to provide high-quality, affordable educations to students from modest financial backgrounds. To help families identify those institutions, the Washington Monthly created the Best Bang for the Buck college rankings 10 years ago. This year’s rankings are broken down by region. (We used the same data and methodology to create the social mobility portion of the main rankings; the methodology is explained here.) 

The Best Bang for the Buck colleges primarily consist of regionally focused public and private nonprofit colleges that are dedicated to providing affordable educations to their students. While some of America’s wealthiest and most rejective colleges—such as Duke, MIT, and Vanderbilt—are highly ranked, many appear in the middle of the pack despite having the resources to do better. For example, Amherst College, ranked the second-best liberal arts school in the country by U.S. News & World Report, checks in at number 42 in the Monthly’s Best Bang ranking for the Northeast region, despite an endowment approaching $4 billion to support fewer than 2,000 students. One spot ahead of Amherst is SUNY at New Paltz, which provides high-value educations to more than three times as many undergraduates on a far more modest budget—the university just completed its first capital campaign to the tune of $25 million. 

In the Northeast, the Massachusetts Maritime Academy again anchors the top of the list, with New York’s Boricua College and Rutgers University–Newark in the top 10, elbowing aside wealthier colleges. Berea College maintains its top ranking in the South, followed by four Texas public universities in the top 10. The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley stands out at number five for graduating 2,106 Pell Grant recipients, or approximately nine times as many as sixth-ranked Vanderbilt. In the Midwest, Union Institute & University takes the top spot, followed by National Louis University and College of the Ozarks. 

In the Southeast, Washington and Lee, Georgetown, and Duke are the top three universities. They represent outstanding value for the students from lower-income families whom they accept, but there aren’t many of those—the three universities combined graduate only about 500 Pell recipients. Florida International University and the University of Florida are immediately behind, in fourth and fifth place, and graduate more than 7,000 Pell recipients while also keeping net prices low. Columbia Southern University, ranking eighth, deserves recognition for being the only for-profit college in the top 10. In the West, Brigham Young University leads the way, followed by the University of Washington Tacoma and the usual cast of 15 California State University campuses in the top 30. 

We only display the top 50 colleges in print. Online, we list the full 200-plus colleges per region. Toward the bottom of those rankings, we find a mix of middling public and private nonprofit colleges along with a number of for-profit college chains. Baylor, Liberty, Tulane, Tulsa, and Xavier (Ohio) are well-known universities that are near the bottom of their respective regions for charging students with modest means high net prices and generating unimpressive outcomes.

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Much of higher education has a love/hate relationship with college rankings: love them when their college does well, and refuse to recognize their existence if they ever drop a spot. But most colleges—and selective institutions in particular—play the rankings game in two key ways. First, they spend considerable time and effort putting together data for U.S. News & World Report to use in their annual rankings. Second, they often have an in-house research staff that is tasked with figuring out how to move up in the rankings as quickly as possible. Sometimes colleges juke their numbers, as evidenced by recent scandals at Temple University and the University of Southern California, in which programs submitted false data for years and are now facing lawsuits from irate students. 

Enter Colin Diver. As president of Reed College in Oregon, he carried on the tradition of his predecessor by refusing to provide data to U.S. News and being willing to bear the consequences of not being highly ranked. After a long and distinguished career in higher education, he has written a book, Breaking Ranks, which is in part a treatise against
prestige-based college rankings that drive colleges to make bad decisions and in part how he would like to evaluate colleges if he got the chance.

In my day job as an education professor and department head, I study higher education accountability while also experiencing firsthand the pressures to move up in the U.S. News rankings. But I have also moonlighted as the Washington Monthly’s rankings guy for the past decade, which gives me perspectives into how the rankings industry works and how colleges respond to rankings. This made me excited to read this book, and it generally does not disappoint.

Diver focuses most of his ire at U.S. News, even though the title is a critique of the rankings industry as a whole. I had to chuckle at the Washington Monthly being labeled as a cousin to the 800-pound gorilla that is U.S. News. He devotes nearly half of the book to two lines of attack that are preaching to the Monthly choir: how rankings can reinforce the existing prestige-based hierarchy and encourage colleges to focus on selectivity instead of inclusivity. These are reasons why the Monthly started publishing college rankings nearly two decades ago, and we do get some credit from Diver for our alternative approach, such as including net prices faced by working-class students and excluding acceptance rates.

Diver then discusses the challenges of producing a single number that captures a college’s performance. He raises legitimate concerns about the selection of variables, how weights are assigned, and how strongly correlated the selected variables are with each other. We at the Monthly get questioned by Diver for having “somehow divined that its Pell graduation-gap measure … factored in at 5.56 percent of its overall rating, while a college’s number of first-generation students deserved a measly 0.92 percent.” He also expresses frustration with rankings seemingly changing their methodology each year to either shake up the results or prevent colleges from gaming them.

These are all issues that I think about every year, along with the rest of the Monthly team, when we put together our college guide. We take pride in using publicly available metrics data and not requiring that colleges fill out onerous surveys in order to be included in our rankings—because data provided directly by colleges to U.S. News has suffered from accuracy issues in recent years, and because we think colleges could better use those resources to directly help students. When we change variables, it is because new measures have become available or old ones have stopped being maintained. Our general principle has been to provide equal weights to groups of variables that all measure the same concept, and we have used a panel of experts to give us feedback on weights and variables. Is any of this perfect? Absolutely not. But we feel like we are doing the best we can to be transparent about our decisions and produce a reasonable set of rankings that highlight the public good of higher education.

Diver uses the fourth part of Breaking Ranks to share his philosophy for evaluating the quality of individual colleges. He begins by discussing the feasibility of using student learning outcomes to measure academic quality, and he is much more optimistic than I am in this regard. While this can be done readily for more technical skills learned in a student’s major, efforts to test general critical thinking and reasoning skills have been a challenge for decades. There was a great deal of hype around the Collegiate Learning Assessment in the 2000s—culminating in Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s book, Academically Adrift, which claimed only modest student learning gains—but the test was never able to catch on broadly or be viewed as a good measure of skills.

The next proposed quality measure is instructional quality, which is even more difficult to measure. Diver discusses the possibility of counting types of pedagogical practices used, others’ opinions of teaching practices, or even student assessments of instructors. Yet he neglects research showing that all of these measures work better in theory than in practice, as students often give their professors lower ratings if they are women, underrepresented minorities, or in STEM fields. He then floats the idea of using instructional expenditures as a proxy for quality, but my take is that this rewards the wealthiest institutions, who can spend a lot of money even if it does not generate student learning.

He then speaks favorably of the approach that the Monthly rankings use to assess other potential measures of quality. He likes using social mobility metrics like the graduation rates of Pell Grant recipients (a proxy for students from lower-income families) and net price for students with modest financial means. He also approves of using graduation rates and earnings using a value-added approach that compares actual and predicted outcomes after adjusting for student and institutional characteristics. 

The Monthly gets another shout-out for our service metrics, which Diver calls “a quirky choice of variables,” and our use of the number of graduates who go on to earn PhDs in the research portion of the rankings. It is a somewhat quirky choice to use items such as ROTC participation and voting engagement, but these metrics capture different aspects of service and have available data. This gets back to an advantage and a limitation of our rankings: We use data that is readily available and not submitted directly by colleges.

Finally, Diver concludes by offering recommendations for students and educators on how to approach the wild world of college rankings. He recommends that students focus more on the underlying data than the college’s position in the rankings, and that they use rankings as a resource to learn more about particular institutions. These are reasonable recommendations, although they assume that students have the time and social capital to access numerous rankings and can choose from among a wide set of colleges to attend. This is great advice for students from upper-middle-class families whose parents went to college. But it is likely overwhelming for first-generation college students who are choosing institutions based on price more than other factors.

He starts his recommendations to educators by stating that college rankings be ignored, which is extremely difficult to do when legislators and governing boards are paying such close attention to them. Perhaps this could work for a president with a national brand and a lot of political capital, like Michael Crow at Arizona State University. But for a leader at a status-conscious institution? Not a chance. This also trickles down to deans, department heads, and faculty, as rankings are often parts of strategic plans.

Diver’s steps of rankings withdrawal, however, are worth considering. He first advises college leaders not to fill out the U.S. News peer reputation survey, which is frequently gamed and has declining response rates. No argument from me on that one. He then recommends that college leaders ignore rankings that do not fit their values and celebrate ones that do. This is crucial, in my view, but colleges have to be consistent in that viewpoint instead of only ignoring rankings when they go down in a given year. If the Monthly or U.S. News rankings fit you better, be prepared to justify good as well as bad changes.

Overall, Breaking Ranks is an easy, breezy read that serves as a useful primer on the pros and cons of college rankings with a very heavy focus on U.S. News. The one thing that I want to emphasize—and the reason why I have been with the Monthly rankings for so many years—is that rankings are not going away. It is on us to produce rankings that try to measure what we think is important, and I take that charge seriously. I think the Monthly rankings do that by focusing on the public good of higher education and shining a light on data points that would otherwise not be known outside a small circle of higher education insiders.

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The impact of the coronavirus pandemic on students and colleges will be felt for a generation to come. Many colleges lost much of their financial reserves as campuses emptied out for months and students returned under expensive social distancing and sanitizing protocols. Lower-income families were hit harder by the pandemic. Many less wealthy Americans lost their jobs, and many lost their lives, especially if they were blue-collar employees who could not work from home. Finally, enrollment fell sharply over the past year, with the largest declines among racial minorities, lower-income students, and men. 

These factors have made it more important than ever for colleges to demonstrate their value to students and society as a whole. For the 10th year, we produced a ranking of Best Bang for the Buck colleges, which is laser focused on showing which colleges do a good job promoting social mobility—and which don’t. The rankings are broken down by region. (We used the same data and methodology to create the social mobility portion of the main rankings, the methodology is explained here.) 

The Best Bang for the Buck colleges across each of the five regions are primarily the unsung heroes of American higher education: colleges with strong regional reputations that serve large numbers of students from low-income families and help them graduate and succeed in the labor market. A few of America’s wealthiest colleges also make appearances near the top of the lists, but many colleges with billion-dollar endowments lag far behind. In the Northeast, the Massachusetts Maritime Academy takes top billing, followed by the City University of New York’s Baruch College, MIT, and Rutgers-Newark. Rutgers-Newark graduates 71 percent of its students and enrolls far more Pell Grant recipients than expected. Its students are able to start quickly repaying their loans.

In the South and Midwest, Berea College and College of the Ozarks maintain their top rankings thanks to their economic diversity, relatively strong graduation rates, and commitment to meeting students’ financial need. The University of Illinois and Texas A&M flagship campuses are second in their respective regions and both graduate more than 1,000 Pell recipients each year. Vanderbilt, Rice, and Northwestern all appear in the top 10 due to strong outcomes for the modest number of lower-income students they serve.  

In the Southeast, the University of South Florida’s Sarasota-Manatee campus edges out the University of Florida and James Madison University for top billing, with Appalachian State University aptly representing regional public universities. Out west, the California State University system tightened its grip on the top of the rankings, grabbing seven of the top 10 spots and 18 of the top 30 positions. When net prices are generally below $10,000 per year, students make strong progress repaying their loans, and students graduate at high rates across the system, it is hard for other universities to compete. 

We only display the top 50 colleges in print. Online, we list the full 200-plus colleges per region. Toward the bottom of those rankings, we find a mix of middling public and private nonprofit colleges along with a number of for-profit college chains. Here at the Monthly, we like to shine the spotlight on colleges with the resources to do better. Take, for example, Tulane University, which ranked 205 among 211 colleges in the South despite an endowment of nearly $1.5 billion. While much of a university’s endowment is restricted to be used for purposes stated by donors, Tulane still has enough money floating around to improve.

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The coronavirus pandemic and the resulting economic crisis have made colleges’ role in enhancing social mobility more important than ever. Typically, during recessions, more Americans enroll in colleges and universities in an effort to boost their job prospects. We may not see enrollments increase until after the public health crisis passes—which could take a year or two—but millions of Americans are doubtlessly thinking ahead to what colleges can do for them. 

For the ninth year, we produced a ranking of Best Bang for the Buck colleges, which is laser focused on showing which colleges do a good job promoting social mobility—and which don’t. The rankings are broken down by region, beginning on page 52. (We used the same data and methodology to create the social mobility portion of the main rankings, which begin on page 62; the methodology is explained on page 106.) We had to use the same data for median earnings and student loan repayment rates as last year, as the U.S. Department of Education did not update college-level data in the College Scorecard this year. Hopefully the federal government will continue to share this important information with the public going forward.

The Best Bang for the Buck colleges across each of the five regions are a mix of some of America’s most elite institutions and hidden gems with strong student outcomes and a commitment to upward mobility. In the Northeast, four Ivy League universities and MIT are joined in the top 10 by Goddard College, the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, Bentley University, the City University of New York’s Baruch College, and Rutgers University–Newark. At Baruch College, low-income students with Pell Grants graduate at essentially the same rate as their wealthier peers. And the cost of attending is reasonable; for a student from a household earning less than $75,000, Baruch has a net price of $2,789 per year. This is what an engine of social mobility looks like. 

In the South and Midwest, Berea College and College of the Ozarks maintain their consistently high rankings thanks to their economic diversity, relatively strong graduation rates, and commitment to meeting students’ financial need. Public universities do well in both regions, with the University of Illinois campuses in Chicago and Urbana-Champaign landing within the top five in the Midwest and Texas A&M’s College Station and Texarkana campuses joining the University ofTexas–Rio Grande Valley in the top five. More than half of UT–Rio Grande Valley students are the first in their families to attend college, and the average net price is just $3,298 per year.

In the Southeast, Georgetown University and Washington and Lee take the top two spots again this year, reflecting the fact that they serve their lower-income students exceptionally well. But combined, they only graduated 262 Pell recipients last year—about a fifth of the number that graduated from seventh-ranked Florida International University, where nearly half of the students are first generation. Finally, in the West, the California State University system continues to dominate the region. Fourteen of the top 23 colleges in the West are Cal State campuses, with Stanislaus taking the top spot this year. The University of Washington’s Tacoma campus and Utah State University also maintained their traditional spots in the top 10.

We only display the top 50 colleges in print. Online, we list the full 200-plus colleges per region. Toward the bottom of those rankings, we find a mix of middling public and private nonprofit colleges along with a number of for-profit college chains. In a time when students and their families are balking at paying high tuition prices for mediocre student outcomes, many of these colleges will struggle and may be forced to change their behavior or risk going out of business. But not all of them. Liberty University, for example, is in no danger of closing, thanks to its billion-dollar endowment and around 100,000 students attending online, but their net price of $25,272 and 44 percent eight-year graduation rate result in them being ranked 262nd of 278 colleges in the Southeast. They can—and must—do better.

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