A Different Kind of College Ranking

We all know college is expensive. If you’re a typical student attending an in-state public university and living on campus, a bachelor’s degree will cost you around $80,000—or about $4,000 a year spread over four years of school and 16 more paying off your college loans. Double that, at least, if you go out of state or to a private university.

But college is pricey even if you never go or already went and paid off your student loans. That’s because the government spends more than $500 billion annually subsidizing the higher education system. That works out to about $1,700 for the average taxpayer, every year.

We bear these costs because we think the investments are worth it. Students expect that their degrees will pay off in higher incomes and with jobs that aren’t tough on the knees and back. Governments subsidize colleges and universities out of a belief that an educated citizenry and workforce, empowered by the new ideas and technologies that emerge from university research, will lead to greater overall economic growth and a better-functioning democracy.

Check out the complete 2025 Washington Monthly rankings here.

But even if that’s true in general (and there’s reason to doubt the democracy part these days), how do we know if it’s true for specific colleges and universities? 

College rankings like U.S. News & World Report’s ought to provide the answer, but they don’t, because they aren’t built for that purpose. Instead, they’re designed primarily to capture the eyeballs of students from affluent families who have been instructed since birth to strive to get into the most selective and prestigious possible colleges so they can stay in the ruling class as adults. To achieve this marketing goal, U.S. News and its dozen or so competitors craft their metrics to reflect a set of self-referential assumptions—that the “best” colleges are those with the best reputations, that let in only the “best” students (that is, those with the highest SAT scores, who happen to attend the wealthiest high schools), and that raise and spend the most money (because, by catering to the rich, they can). This assures that the same 10 or 20 elite universities, most of them private, always dominate the top ranks. It’s a smart business model for a publisher. But it leaves the vast majority of students, who don’t have sky-high test scores and money to burn, without the information they need to navigate one of the biggest decisions of their lives. And it makes average taxpayers wonder if the country is getting its money’s worth.

For two decades, the Washington Monthly has published an alternative set of rankings based on a different definition of what constitutes excellence in higher education. Instead of rewarding colleges for their wealth, prestige, and exclusivity, we measure how much they help ordinary middle- and working-class students get ahead, encourage democratic participation and service to the country, and produce the scholars and scholarship that drive economic growth and human flourishing. These, we think, are what most Americans want from their investments in the higher ed system.

This year, we’ve revised our rankings to provide an even clearer picture of how individual colleges are performing—and to take account of new realities facing higher education. As everyone knows, the Trump administration has launched an unprecedented assault on university research budgets and internal governance (an attack that Kevin Carey mordantly illuminates here). Meanwhile, in a more benign upheaval, the organization that categorizes colleges, the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, rewrote its definitions of what constitutes a major research university, a liberal arts college, and so on. 

So, for 2025, we’ve arranged our traditional metrics differently. First, we’ve combined all four-year colleges and universities into a single master list of more than 1,400 institutions, which we’re calling the Best Colleges for Your Tuition (and Tax) Dollars. This allows you to see how any college or university—public or private, big or small, research or teaching—stacks up against all the others. (You can read our methodology here.) Second, to make apples-to-apples comparisons, we’ve moved our research metrics into a new companion ranking, America’s Best Colleges for Research, which recognizes the contributions of the subset of institutions that invest the most in scientific and technical discovery. (You can also read rankings by traditional categories—liberal arts, master’s, and bachelor’s colleges—here.) 

To get a sense of how different the higher ed hierarchy looks when measured by the Washington Monthly’s metrics, check out the adjacent chart, which shows the highest-scoring 30 schools on the Best Colleges for Your Tuition (and Tax) Dollars list. The first thing you’ll notice is that prestigious and world-famous universities make up only half the list. The other half are mostly unheralded public institutions, many of which outrank the elite ones. The University of Texas–Rio Grande Valley lands 21 slots above Harvard University, Florida International University eight above Duke University. Indeed, the highest-ranking elite school, Princeton University, comes in at number five, immediately below three campuses in the California State University system that are largely unknown outside their regions, including second-place Fresno State. And the number one college in America, by our lights, is Berea College, a liberal arts school in rural Kentucky.

These unsung colleges are, to be blunt, not the kind to which ambitious and well-off parents urge their children to apply. But the colleges don’t care, and neither do we, because what makes them extraordinary is what they do for students from not-so-well-off households. Berea provides moderate-to-low-income students from Appalachia with rigorous academics and valuable work experience while charging incredibly low tuition. Those students graduate with the lowest average debt levels in the country, many with degrees in socially beneficial fields like nursing, and with post-college earnings $5,000 higher than students with similar backgrounds at other schools. Fresno State offers students in California’s poverty-pockmarked Central Valley affordable tuition, research and community service opportunities, and degrees that earn them middle-class incomes. Some go on to become managers of agricultural businesses where, as children, they once picked crops. We’ve profiled 25 of these exceptional institutions here. 

For a less inspirational experience, check out the schools near the bottom of the list. You’ll find some for-profits like DeVry University’s campus in Columbus, Georgia; religious institutions like Abilene Christian University in Texas; various art and music schools whose students pretty much know they’re studying for professions that don’t pay; and a slew of small liberal arts colleges, many of them in out-of-the-way locations and struggling to survive. All these schools tend to combine high net prices for median-income students with poor post-college earnings and high debt loads. Some are outright predatory. Others are doing the best they know how in tough situations. All are under increased threat of closure by provisions in the recently signed “One Big Beautiful” legislation that will cut off federal funds to underperforming colleges. Our hearts go out to the small college towns that will suffer when that legislation kicks in. But our advice to prospective students: You’ll do better by searching higher up on our Best Colleges for Your Tuition (and Tax) Dollars list. 

Comparing the best- and worst-performing colleges in a particular state can be especially enlightening. Nate Weisberg looked at New York and found some hidden gems. One is tiny Boricua College, number 45 on the list, which mostly serves adult Latinos with day jobs who would otherwise struggle to earn a degree. Another is the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, number 88, part of the famous City University of New York system. It enrolls a student body that is more than 75 percent nonwhite, half first-generation, and largely working class. The net price for median-income students is just $2,661, and its graduates pursue public service careers—law enforcement, social work, legal aid—at rates that elite colleges can’t match. Indeed, at the other end of the spectrum are Sarah Lawrence College (ranked at number 1,095) and the New School (1,379), two progressive New York institutions once known for their outreach to the working classes that are now better at ignoring them.

One pattern you might notice is that the upper reaches of our ranking are dominated by public universities from a handful of states. New York is one. California, Florida, Texas, and North Carolina are others. These states have relatively strong centralized systems of higher ed governance, which helps keep spending down and quality up, and abiding commitments to provide low tuition and fees to in-state students of modest means. But as Christopher M. Mullin reports, these same centralized systems are also how state politicians like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are imposing a conservative ideological agenda in the classroom. 

Donald Trump is attempting to do the same at the federal level by decimating research funding to universities that don’t bend to his political will. The biggest targets of his assault, naturally, are elite universities in blue states. But like much of Trump’s second-term agenda, the greatest pain is being felt in red states whose voters he claims to champion, as Weisberg explains in his introduction to our Best Colleges for Research ranking. 

The Monthly’s rankings can help prospective students search for colleges and average citizens judge the performance of their alma maters. But they can be even more useful to higher education leaders—the professors, presidents, and trustees who run individual institutions, as well as the elected officials who make the policy and spending decisions that ultimately determine the fate of American higher education.  

These leaders know, for instance, that the abnormally large Millennial generation is giving way to the smaller Gen Z, making it harder for colleges to fill seats—and balance their budgets. One hopeful countertrend is that the number of Hispanic high school graduates is projected to increase by 16 percent by 2041. Yet decision-makers lack good data on which colleges do the best job serving this all-important group. That’s why the Washington Monthly’s Rob Wolfe, in collaboration with the nonprofit Excelencia in Education, has created a new Best Hispanic-Serving Colleges ranking. 

More broadly, rankings influence the decisions education leaders make, for good or ill. U.S. News’s lists are so powerful that college presidents, under pressure from their boards and legislatures, try to climb the rankings by making their institutions more selective, spending more money on amenities, and recruiting wealthy students from around the country. While this can elevate their national “brand,” it also ratchets up college costs, limits access, and contributes to the average person’s sense that colleges and universities aren’t trust-worthy—which the Trump administration has been quick to exploit.

The Washington Monthly’s rankings create a different incentive structure. To climb our list, college can’t just cater to the children of the donor class, spend money on new buildings and cover the costs with higher tuition, or let lower-income students flounder and leave without graduating. Instead, they must open their doors to non-wealthy students, help them earn degrees that lead to decent incomes, encourage them to give back to their communities, and keep a check on spending. Those are outcomes that trustees and lawmakers in both parties should be able to get behind. And colleges are figuring out that they can use their high Monthly rankings to advocate for more generous budgets and other support. If that trend continues—and we hope it does—America will be a more democratic, equitable, and prosperous country.

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