A college degree is costly, to both students and taxpayers. Here’s the only list that shows which institutions provide good value to both.
September/October 2025
Posted inCollege Guide
Higher Education: What Trump Hath Wrought
The administration’s policies aren’t reforming higher education. They’re decimating it.
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25 Best-in-Class Colleges
A selection of stand-out institutions from the Washington Monthly’s college rankings.
Posted inCollege Guide
How Florida Universities Became World-Class
Florida is a national leader in higher education, with universities that focus intently on success—and achieve it. Surprised? That’s understandable. Florida is known for many things—theme parks, retirement communities, deer-eating pythons—but academic excellence is typically not one of them. The state boasts no prestigious Ivy League–like schools. To the extent that it has a collegiate […]
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New York Colleges: Best and Worst
From the Bronx to Greenwich Village, we ranked the schools that serve their students—and the ones that serve themselves.
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Campus Climate Rankings Miss the Point
Free speech advocates and DEI supporters both focus on how comfortable students feel expressing themselves. But the real question is whether professors expose students to the full range of scholarly debate on divisive issues.
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Trump’s Vocational Education Con
During the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump demeaned institutions of higher education as boondoggle bastions of Marxism and scary “DEI” policies while touting the value of vocational education to help Americans get good-paying jobs. Now back in the Oval Office, he has the opportunity to turn his impulses on education into policies. But we’ve seen far […]
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Student Loan Debt: What Went Wrong and How to Fix It
When I started at the Department of Education in the 1990s, student loans were a popular middle-class benefit. College affordability or student loan debt were rarely front-page news. Our dingy offices, a converted World War II warehouse, were a daily reminder of how our work seemed overlooked, too. But in those hallways—literally, my desk was […]
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America’s Best Colleges for Research
For the past two decades, the Washington Monthly has included in its annual college rankings measures of a university’s research prowess—its record of producing the new scholarship and scholars that drive economic growth and human flourishing. This year, we’ve put those metrics into a separate ranking, the Best Colleges for Research, which appear at the […]
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America’s Best Hispanic-Serving Colleges
In a time of enrollment crunch, universities have a moral and existential obligation to serve the one student population that’s growing. We tracked how good a job they’re doing.
