Universities Weblog

Take that, U.S. News. Washington Monthly has yet again issued a different take on college rankings. As it did last year, the magazine has ranked colleges and universities based on societal worth. Say what?

I'll let the magazine's editors clarify:

We asked ourselves: What are reasonable indicators of how much a school is benefiting the country? We came up with three: how well it performs as an engine of social mobility (ideally helping the poor to get rich rather than the very rich to get very, very rich), how well it does in fostering scientific and humanistic research, and how well it promotes an ethic of service to country.

Based on those criteria, they devised the following rankings:

Universities

1) MIT
2) California-Berkeley
3) Penn State
4) UCLA
5) Texas A&M
6) California-San Diego
7) Stanford Cornell
9) South Carolina State University
10) California-Davis

Liberal Arts Colleges

1) Bryn Mawr College
2) Wellesley College
3) Wesleyan University
4) Haverford College
5) Amherst College
6) Mount Holyoke College
7) Claremont McKenna College Williams College
9) Whitman College
10) Swarthmore College

You can find the complete lists here.

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