The Washington Monthly's got a new college ranking system, with the tagline: "Other guides ask what colleges can do for you. We ask what colleges are doing for the country." I like this idea, if not necessarily its specific implementation. But of course, I'm only writing about it because my Alma Matter came in first! The premise is very good:
The first question we asked was, what does America need from its universities? From this starting point, we came up with three central criteria: Universities should be engines of social mobility, they should produce the academic minds and scientific research that advance knowledge and drive economic growth, and they should inculcate and encourage an ethic of service.
This may or may not be how you want to choose a college to go to, but it's definitely a better way than looking at incoming SAT scores to evaluate its contribution to society. There may be a lots issues with the implementation -- to name just one example, a good portion of the national service part of the rankings comes from ROTC participation, which would penalize colleges who have banned ROTC from campus due to its discriminatory elligibility requirements (still, I think a few of these schools are in the top 10 liberal arts colleges, so they must be making up for it in other ways). I was slightly surprised to see MIT on top -- the research component is obvious, since the main thing they weight is research funding and the production of science and engineering PhDs, and its always been way ahead of its peers on social mobility. This was one of the reasons I went there -- I liked the idea of being in a place where everyone was there on their own merits, and not at a place full of legacy children. But I had never thought of MIT as being so good with the service -- most people were into their work, and not so in tune with the outside world. Apparently this is a new development: in this arena, "MIT leaped from near the bottom of the pack three years ago to near the top today." Happy to hear it.
