Posted on 08/30/2007 12:53:02 PM PDT by r-q-tek86
This month we present our third annual Washington Monthly College Guide. As in previous years, our aim is to offer an alternative to the U.S. News & World Report and similar college guides. Those guides focus on what colleges can do for you. We focus on what colleges are doing for the country.
The rankings can be found here, and as you’ll see, the results diverge sharply from the rankings most of us are used to seeing. Princeton, number one on the U.S. News list, comes in seventy-eighth on ours. Texas A&M, rated sixtieth by U.S. News, is number one on our list.
Surely, you might ask, we don’t really think that Texas A&M is better than Princeton? Well, yes, in a way. Remember, we aren’t trying, as U.S. News does, to rate how selective or academically prestigious a given school is, but rather how much it contributes to the common good. The whole point is to recognize the broader role colleges and universities play in our national life and to reward those institutions that best fulfill that role. After all, almost every major challenge America now faces—from stagnant wages to the lack of fluent Arab speakers in the federal government—could be met in part by better harnessing the power of our colleges and universities.
So instead of measuring, say, the average SAT scores of incoming freshmen, or the percentage of alumni who donate money, we rank colleges based on three criteria: social mobility, research, and service. In other words, is the school recruiting and graduating low-income students? Is it producing PhDs and cutting-edge research? And is it encouraging in its students an ethic of service? By this yardstick, Texas A&M really does outperform every other university in America (a nose ahead of UCLA and UC Berkeley).
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonmonthly.com ...
Well, my school (UNC Chapel Hill) at least made it in the top 20 (but just). “The Hill” has become a bastion for liberals over the years, much to my disdain.
Don’t know if your brother saw this one...
Whoop! back achya!!
Texas A&M is a wonderful school.
“Texas A&M, rated sixtieth by U.S. News, is number one on our list.”
I lol’d
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