Come See What the New York Times’ Joe Nocera is Raving About

The Washington Monthly’s College Guide issue, which was guest edited by our very own Kevin Carey, received a very nice write up in the New York Times this weekend. Columnist Joe Nocera praised the Washington Monthly’s annual college rankings as an alternative to those compiled by a certain other magazine:

U.S. News cares a lot about how much money a school raises and how much it spends: on faculty; on small classes; on facilities; and so on. It cares about how selective the admissions process is.

So universities that once served populations that were different from the Harvard or Yale student body now go after the same elite high school students with the highest SAT scores. And schools know that, if they want to get a better ranking, they need to spend money like mad — even though they will have to increase tuition that is already backbreaking. “If you figure out how to do the same service for less money, your U.S. News ranking will go down,” says Kevin Carey, the director of education policy at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan research group. The rankings encourage trends that ill-serve the country…

…As it happens, Carey has been working for a number of years with The Washington Monthly to compile a different kind of college ranking. (I was an editor at The Monthly in the late 1970s.) Instead of trying to serve as a gauge of status, The Monthly’s rankings attempt to gauge more useful measures: social mobility, for instance, or “bang for the buck.” Its top-ranked national universities this year are the University of California-San Diego and Texas A&M. Neither is ranked in the top 30 by U.S. News. All they do is graduate a higher percentage of students than you would expect given their populations — at a reasonable price.

Yes, The Washington Monthly’s rankings are yet another list compiled by magazine editors, inevitably flawed. But the point the magazine is trying to make is that this is the model of higher education we should be encouraging. Can you really disagree?

If you want see what Nocera is raving about, come join Washington Monthly and the New America Foundation for a live panel discussion on Wednesday focusing on the rankings and other pressing higher education issues raised in the College Guide issue.

Financial aid expert Stephen Burd will make the case for putting the student loan repo man out of business by adopting student loan repayment policies pioneered in Australia and the U.K. New America education policy program director Kevin Carey will discuss his recent tour through the heart of the West Coast higher ed tech entrepreneurial scene. Washington Monthly Editor Paul Glastris will explore the magazine’s alternative college rankings, including a new measure that identifies colleges that do the best job of graduating students at the lowest price. And there will be other panelists, including  a representative from one of America’s “best bang for the buck” colleges will explain how they do it.

Here’s more about the event:

Making College Cheaper and Better

Participants

Opening Remarks
Jamie P. Merisotis
President and CEO, Lumina Foundation

Featuring
Stephen Burd
Senior Policy Analyst, Education Policy Program, New America Foundation

Kevin Carey
Director, Education Policy Program, New America Foundation

Robert G. Gaines
Special Assistant to the Chancellor, Elizabeth City State University, NC

Jordan Goldman
Founder and CEO, Unigo

Kevin James
Legislative Assistant to Representative Tom Petri (R-WI)

Moderator
Paul Glastris
Editor in Chief, Washington Monthly

Follow @NewAmericaEd for updates and use #CollegeGuide to join the conversation online.