Our higher education system is unmoored from any honest appraisal of how well colleges help students learn.
September/October 2019
The Pre-College Racket
Elite universities are making millions off summer programs for teens. What are they really selling?
Teaching the Ivory Tower New Tricks
A guide to the people and ideas reshaping higher education.
The Voting Wars Come to Campus
Students face a growing maze of voting restrictions. Can they find their way through in time for 2020?
Putting Work Study to Work
The aid program is underfunded and underappreciated. Here’s how to unleash its potential.
Escaping the Transfer Trap
Want more students to get bachelor’s degrees? Let community colleges award them.
When College Rankings Get Personal
After fifteen years of publishing the Washington Monthly College Guide, I’ve finally become a customer.
America’s Affordable Elite Colleges 2019
Which selective schools give high-achieving, non-wealthy students a break—and which break their bank accounts?
America’s Best Colleges for Student Voting 2019
The schools doing the most to turn students into citizens.
America’s Best Colleges for Adult Learners 2019
Nearly a third of all college students are twenty-five or older. Yet no publication ranks the top schools for them—except us.
America’s Best Bang for the Buck Colleges 2019
Our one-of-a-kind list of schools that help non-wealthy students attain marketable degrees at affordable prices.
When Leaving Your Children Is a Selfless Act
How one family’s journey from the Philippines to Texas tells the story of global migration.
Democrats Need More Than Demographic Change to Win
Why the GOP’s inevitable demographic demise may not be so inevitable.
Drowning In Free Speech
In the age of Facebook and Google, can the marketplace of ideas be saved?
Why It’s So Hard to Build Trust In Government
Americans literally can’t believe popular public programs are public.
The Journalist Who Changed How We See Gay America
Randy Shilts was stubbornly committed to truth telling—no matter the cost.
Lincoln the Politician
The president most known for his moral vision was also a master political operator.
A Note on Methodology: 4-year Colleges and Universities
To establish the set of colleges included in the rankings, we started with the 1,732 colleges in the fifty states that are listed in the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and have a 2018 Carnegie basic classification of research, master’s, baccalaureate, and baccalaureate/associate’s colleges, are not exclusively graduate colleges, participate… Read more »
A Note on Methodology: Affordable Elites
Our “affordable elite” ranking consists of the 208 four-year universities included in our main rankings (see page 105 for general inclusion criteria) that were in the highest selectivity categories in Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges. This includes the very competitive+, highly competitive, highly competitive+, and most competitive categories. We used the following six measures of… Read more »
A Note on Methodology: Best Colleges for Adult Learners
We began with the 3,295 postsecondary institutions in the fifty states and Washington, D.C., that were listed in the Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) as being active in the 2017–18 academic year and had a Carnegie basic classification in 2018 of between 1 and 23, excluding many colleges that only grant… Read more »
