In 2005, the Washington Monthly magazine set out to “rate schools based on what they are doing for the country — on whether they’re improving social mobility, producing research, and promoting public service” through its annual college rankings guide. The approach was developed as an alternative to the U.S. News & World Report annual rankings, “which relies on crude and easily manipulated measures of wealth, exclusivity and prestige,” says the Washington Monthly.
On Monday, the Washington-based investigative and policy analysis magazine released its 2013 college rankings just a few days after President Barack Obama proposed that the federal government develop a ratings system to measure colleges and universities based on their affordability and quality. Among the rankings, Washington Monthly editors have added a new category, “Best Bang for the Buck,” which measures economic value students receive per dollar spent at a given college or university.
“We did that without any knowledge that the administration was going to come out with a proposal to create a rating system almost exactly like ours,” said Paul Glastris, the Monthly’s editor in chief.
“We were already set to launch our college guide today and all of a sudden in the middle of last week the president gives a speech saying, ‘Hey, I’m going to do this,’” explained Glastris. “I think it’s a question of these ideas are in the air. I think we’ve helped put them there. And the administration, to its credit, is aggressively moving in that direction.”
Glastris noted that, while the Obama college ratings idea has to be fleshed out in much greater policy detail, the Monthly’s Best Bang for Buck ranking addresses similar concerns on how well schools are keeping tuition affordable, faring with their graduation rates, providing access to low-income students and producing gainfully-employed graduates.
“We added [the Best Bang for the Buck] measure to our main rankings for the first time last year and then this year we broke it out into its own separate ranking,” Glastris said.
