Washington Monthly - September/October 2022 - 12

Editor's Note
Paul Glastris
The Washington Monthly
College Rankings: The Origin Story
T
he journalists James and Deborah Fallows are best known
these days for their hit book and HBO documentary Our
Towns, a journey-by-small-plane look at the resilience and renewal
of unheralded communities across America. I've known
them for almost four decades as colleagues, mentors, and
friends, and I am delighted to publish features by each of them
in our annual college guide and rankings issue. But behind
their two stories and our long friendship is another story-
one that explains how the Washington Monthly came to rank
colleges in the first place and what we aim to do next.
Jim and Deb were writing for The Atlantic and contributing
pieces to this magazine in the mid-1980s when I joined
the Monthly as a young editor-the same job Jim had held a
decade earlier. In 1996, when I was working as a correspondent
for U.S. News & World Report, Jim took over as editor. His
and Deb's home in Northwest D.C. became an after-hours haven
for a group of us trying to figure out how to reinvent the
newsmagazine.
One of the subjects of those deliberations was what to do
about U.S. News's annual college rankings. Though the rankings
were influential in the higher education world and produced
a river of revenue for the magazine, their underlying
metrics raised eyebrows within and outside the organization.
Jim decided to commission a study for internal use by the National
Opinion Research Center (NORC). The study concluded
that the ways in which U.S. News weighted and combined its
various measures into one overall rating lacked " any defensible
empirical or theoretical basis. "
Raising doubts about the publication's most valuable franchise
was probably not the best way for Jim to endear himself
to its owner, the real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman-and in
the summer of 1998, Mort fired him. I quit right after that and
went to work as a White House speechwriter (another job Jim
had previously held). In 2000, the internal NORC report fell
into the hands (who can say how?) of another young Washington
Monthly editor, Nick Thompson, who wrote a pioneering
takedown of the U.S. News rankings.
After my White House stint, I took over from Charlie Peters
as editor in chief of the Washington Monthly, and the magazine
continued to hammer away at the flaws in the U.S. News
lists. Then, in 2005, we published the first of what would become
our annual alternative college guide. Where U.S. News rewards
colleges for their wealth, prestige, and exclusivity, there12
September/October 2022
by aggravating America's racial and class divides, the Monthly
ranks schools based on three very different criteria meant to
do the opposite. The first is how well colleges recruit and graduate
students of modest means with reasonably priced degrees
that lead to decent-paying jobs. The second is their record of
producing the scholars and scholarship that drive economic
growth and human progress. The third is the degree to which
they encourage students to become active members of the democracy
through voting and public service.
There is a fourth criterion, however, by which the value of
colleges should ideally be judged: their contribution to the economic
and civic life of their communities. We all know of examples
of this-for instance, how research from Stanford University
and the University of California at Berkeley gave rise
to the Bay Area's tech economy, or how certain small towns
manage to retain jobs and cultural life thanks to the presence
of a local college. There are also plenty of examples of the
opposite-of universities doing little for their locales, leading
to familiar " town and gown " resentments.
It's hard to quantify how much a college does or doesn't give
back to its community, and harder still to do so in ways that allow
colleges to be compared to one another. It's therefore a phenomenon
that can't be accounted for in rankings but must be
documented qualitatively, on a case-by-case basis, by on-theground
reporting.
The two journalists in America who have probably done the
best of this kind of reporting are Jim and Deb Fallows. Fortunately,
when we reached out to see if they would write on the
subject for us, they enthusiastically agreed to contribute not
one but a series of stories for the Monthly over the next year.
In this issue, they focus on one school and city they know
well: Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. In his piece, Jim
explains how the university, under the leadership of its energetic
president, Geoffrey Mearns, accepted responsibility for
running the city's failing public schools. In hers, Deb homes in
on how the college's student newspaper has all but taken over
coverage of the schools from the hollowed-out local paper.
The Fallowses believe that something genuinely new is happening
in America. As Jim writes, " An under-noticed generation
of college leaders is deciding to use their institutions as
deliberate instruments of community, civic, and regional advancement. "
The aim of these stories is to help turn that trend
into a movement.
Washington Monthly - September/October 2022

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