Irked by what they saw as flaws in U.S. News’s methodology for ranking colleges, a group of reformers in the late 1990s pioneered a new approach. With a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts, a panel of educational experts set out to develop a way to quantify how well colleges actually teach their undergraduates. The… Read more »
Higher Education
America’s Best Community Colleges
Why they’re better than some four-year universities.
Introduction: A Different Kind of College Ranking
This summer, a group of sixty-one liberal arts college presidents announced that they would no longer participate in the annual U.S. News & World Report college rankings. We were of two minds about this news. On the one hand, we’ve long argued that the U.S. News ratings are silly, because they don’t measure what its… Read more »
Built to Teach
What your alma mater could learn from Cascadia Community College
What Happened to the Liberal Arts?
Liz Coleman, the president of Bennington College Bennington College talks (in 2009) about what’s wrong with American higher education and how we might be able to fix it. The progression of today’s college student is to jettison every interest except one. And within that one, to continually narrow the focus, learning more and more about… Read more »
Professors’ Salary Increases
All of higher education might still be suffering from something of a financial crisis, but the problems aren’t, it turns out, evenly distributed. According to a piece by Andrea Fuller in the Chronicle of Higher Education: Salaries for faculty members across all disciplines rose by 1.9 percent this year, nearly matching the 2-percent rise in… Read more »
The Washington Monthly’s 2005 College Guide
Other guides ask what colleges can do for you. We ask what colleges are doing for the country.
