Stanford University, Harvey Mudd College Top Washington Monthly’s 2022 Best College Rankings

Washington Monthly has chosen Stanford University as the country’s top national university and Harvey Mudd College as the best liberal arts college in its just-released 2022 College Guide.

Washington Monthly promotes its rankings, first published in 2005, as the socially conscious alternative to the college rankings by U.S. News & World Report, which it’s criticized for relying too much on measures of wealth, exclusivity and prestige that are subject to inaccurate reporting or institutional fudging as the recent allegations involving Columbia University illustrate.

Washington Monthly puts its emphasis on the social and intellectual contributions that institutions make for the country. According to its editors, “Instead of rating colleges by wealth, fame, and exclusivity, we prize social mobility, public service, and research.” Those methodological differences matter - while there is considerable overlap between Washington Monthly and U. S. News top schools, there are also numerous and large differences as detailed below.

Methodology

Three equally weighted composites are used to arrive at Washington Monthly’s rankings. Each of the three metrics integrates several publicly available data components that differ somewhat depending on the type of institution being evaluated. Here’s the methodology for national universities:

• Social mobility uses nine indices including overall graduation rate, the difference between actual and predicted graduation rate (based on the makeup of the student body), the percentage of students who receive Pell Grants, the number of Pell Grant graduates, college affordability, actual versus predicted earnings of students 10 years after college entry, and two measures of student loan repayment.
• Research consists of five criteria, including total institutional research spending, the number of science and engineering PhDs awarded, the number of undergraduate alumni who go on to earn PhDs, prestigious faculty awards, and the proportion of faculty who are members of the National Academies.
• Community and national service combines six factors: the percentage of students in campus ROTC programs; the percentages of students in AmeriCorps and alumni in the Peace Corps relative to college size, as well as whether colleges match Segal AmeriCorps Education Awards; the percentage of work-study grant money spent on community service projects; whether the institution received the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification (a measure of community involvement), the level of an institution’s student voting engagement, and the share of degrees awarded in health, education, and social work majors.

National Universities

Here are the top 20 national universities as ranked by Washington Monthly. In parenthesis is the corresponding ranking by U.S. News.

1. Stanford University (6)
2. University of Pennsylvania (8)
3. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2)
4. Princeton University (1)
5. Duke University (9)
6. Harvard University (2)
7. Yale University (5)
8. Cornell University (17)
9. University of California, Berkeley (22)
10. University of Notre Dame (19)
11. University of California, Davis (38)
12. Dartmouth College (13)
13. Brigham Young University (79)
14. California Institute of Technology (9)
15. Georgetown University (23)
16. University of Wisconsin (42)
17. University of Illinois (47)
18. National Louis University (range: 299–391)
19. University of Washington (59)
20. University of California, San Diego (34)

Six of Washington Monthly’s top 20 schools are public institutions, including three campuses in the University of California system. By comparison, only one public university - UCLA - makes the U.S. News top 20. Seven of Washington Monthly’s top 20 don’t appear in the top 30 for U.S. News.

Even bigger differences are found within the larger set of rankings. For example,

• Utah State University is #22 on the Monthly list and #249 on the U.S. News list (a 227-point difference).
• Tulane University is #407 in the Monthly ranking; U.S. News ranks it at #42 (365-point difference).
• Baylor University is ranked #382 by the Monthly; U.S. News has it at #75 (307-point difference).

Liberal Arts Colleges

Washington Monthly has a separate ranking of liberal arts colleges, schools that focus on undergraduate education, especially in the arts and sciences. Using a smaller number of indicators for the research metric than for the national universities, the top 20 colleges (with the corresponding U.S. News rankings in parenthesis) are:

1. Harvey Mudd College (28)
2. Pomona College (4)
3. Wesleyan University (17)
4. Washington and Lee University (11)
5. Berea College (30)
6. Williams College (1)
7. Swarthmore College (3)
8. Claremont McKenna College (8)
9. Lafayette College (38)
10. Amherst College (2)
11. Bryn Mawr College (30)
12. Haverford College (16)
13. Smith College (17)
14. Middlebury College (9)
15. Grinnell College (13)
16. Macalester College (27)
17. Bowdoin College (6)
18. Carleton College (9)
19. College of Saint Benedict (92)
20. Wellesley College (5)

As in the past, Washington Monthly ranks institutions in several other categories, including:

• Master’s Universities (institutions awarding a significant number of master’s degrees but few or no doctoral degrees). The top-ranked institution in this category was Evergreen State University in Washington, followed by the State University of New York - Geneseo, and California State University - Los Angeles. Of the top ten schools in this category, five were campuses of the California State University system.
• Bachelor’s Colleges (institutions that almost exclusively award bachelor’s degrees). The top three were: California State University Maritime Academy, Ohio Northern University and Cooper Union.
• Best Bang for the Buck Colleges. Organized by five regions, the top-ranked schools were Union Institute and University (Midwest), Massachusetts Maritime Academy (Northeast), Berea College (South), Washington and Lee University (Southeast), and Brigham Young University (West).
• Best Colleges for Student Voting. This year 230 schools made the list, 26 more than in 2021. Of those 230 schools, 127 had a student registration rate of 85% or more, and 39 were over 90%.
• New to the rankings this year are lists of the best and worst vocational certification programs in areas such as cosmetology, HVAC maintenance and medical assistants. The evaluations of these sub-bacclaureate certificates focus on the average debt and earnings of students in these programs.

The upcoming days and weeks will see more college rankings released. Forbes publishes its results on August 30; U.S. News will come out with its new lists on September 12. Despite an increasing number of methodological differences in the various ranking systems, a comparison of the results allows a few generalizations.

First, a group of well-resourced, mostly private colleges and universities consistently do many things very well. Regardless of methodology, they rate highly in any of the most cited ranking systems. Stanford, Duke, MIT and most of the Ivy League universities are examples. So are Williams College, Amherst, and Swarthmore.

Second, public research universities fare better with methodologies that emphasize social mobility, economic value and research contributions. The University of California campuses and several powerhouse Big Ten schools illustrate this point. And, in terms of overall social impact, these institutions educate far more students than the elite privates.

Third, the rankings are including a wider range of colleges, universities and programs. The majority of post-secondary students don’t go to Ivy League schools, elite colleges or land-grant universities. They enroll in community colleges, public regional universities, urban institutions and small private colleges. More information about the performance of those institutions is valuable.

Finally, improvements in public data such as that contained in the College Scorecard and the Integrated Postsecondary Education System (IPEDS) have allowed all ranking systems to focus more on student outcomes like graduation rates, post-graduation earnings, social mobility and indebtedness than on institutional inputs and spending, which were more frequently emphasized in the past. That’s good news, and Washington Monthly deserves credit for increasing national attention to these important indicators.