For Some, Harvard's Not Number One

Harvard may or may not be among the nation’s top ten schools—it depends on whom you ask.

Despite tying with Princeton for the number one spot in U.S. News and World Report’s annual ranking of America’s Best Colleges for the third year in a row, Harvard found itself ranked sixteenth in the inaugural edition of Washington Monthly’s college guide, which came out in mid-August.

While the U.S. News and World Report’s rankings, which were released on Aug. 18, are designed to measure “academic quality” through the use of several criteria including admissions selectivity, faculty-student ratios, students’ SAT scores, and graduation rates, Washington Monthly College Guide ranks colleges and universities on a completely different basis.

“While other guides ask what colleges can do for students, we ask what colleges are doing for the country,” say the magazine’s editors in a statement posted on the Washington Monthly’s website.

Rather than attempting to measure institutions’ academic excellence, Washington Monthly instead seeks to measure a college’s contribution to the country, using criteria such as community service, social mobility, and research output.

To calculate a college’s contribution to the country, Washington Monthly factored statistics like the number of students participating in ROTC or the Peace Corps, the number of low-income students enrolled at each school, and the number of Ph.D’s that each school awarded in engineering and science fields into the equation.

While this methodology landed Harvard at number 16—just behind Yale at 15—it placed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the top spot.

“At least by the criteria we measured, Harvard scored quite respectably, just not in the very top tier, where in other rankings people are used to seeing it,” said Paul D. Glastris, editor-in-chief of Washington Monthly. “Which means, I think, that Harvard has some work to do in the areas we measured.”

But Director of Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis ’70-’73 said that Harvard does not attribute much importance to college rankings.

“It has never seemed to us that the precise numerical rankings are helpful to individual students who are considering which colleges might be suitable for them,” said McGrath Lewis. “But the information in the tables can be very useful,” she added.

Princeton, which shares with Harvard the number one spot in U.S. News and World Report’s rankings, fared even worse than Harvard in the Washington Monthly rankings, coming in at 44th place.

“We’re not necessarily trying to say that Princeton’s a crappy school because it finished 44th,” said Benjamin R. Wallace-Wells, and editor at Washington Monthly who assisted with the College Guide.

“We do this all with the understanding that ours is one of a whole bunch of rankings out there,” Wallace-Wells added. “I think that all we’re trying to do is say that this set of values—how a school serves the country—is pretty important, and there should be more discussion about it not just among students applying to schools, but within the leadership of the universities.”