“The Washington Monthly College Guide”:
“The first question we asked was, what does America need from its universities? From this starting point, we came up with three central criteria: Universities should be engines of social mobility, they should produce the academic minds and scientific research that advance knowledge and drive economic growth, and they should inculcate and encourage an ethic of service. We designed our evaluation system accordingly…
“Given our very different way of measuring success, we suspected that the marquee schools routinely found at the top of U.S. News’s list might not finish at the very top of ours—but even we were surprised by what the data revealed. Only three schools in the 2006 U.S. News top 10 are among our highest-ranked: MIT, Stanford, and the University of Pennsylvania. In addition, while the private colleges of the Ivy League dominate most rankings of the nation’s best colleges, they didn’t dominate ours—only Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania made our top 10, and Princeton (tied with Harvard for the top slot on U.S. News’s list) was all the way down at #44, a few slots behind South Carolina State University.
“Our list was also more heavily populated with first-rate state schools (the University of California system scored particularly well) than that of U.S. News, which has no public universities within its top ten. UCLA finished second in our overall ranking, UC-Berkeley third, Penn State University sixth, Texas A&M; seventh, UC-San Diego eighth and the University of Michigan tenth. Each of our highest-rated schools are, by any reasonable national measure, academically serious schools. But they are not the super-elite—the Harvards and Yales—that normally dominate lists of the nation’s “best” universities…”