2012 Washington Monthly College Rankings Now Available!

Washington Monthly just released its 2012 college rankings. The magazine uses a methodology very different from U.S. News & World Report. While U.S. News tends to privilege the privileged, Washington Monthly highly ranks those schools that do real good in the world by promoting social mobility, practicing public service, and generating research. As a result, the top ten national universities in the Washington Monthly ranking look significantly different from what we'll see when the U.S. News rankings come out next month. Here's the Washington Monthly list:

1. UCSD
2. Texas A&M
3. Stanford University
4. UNC Chapel Hill
5. UC Berkeley
6. UCLA
7. Case Western Reserve University
8. University of Washington (Seattle)
9. UC Riverside
10. Georgia Tech

You can click on a school's name to see the admissions profile, and be sure to visit the Washington Monthly website to see the placement of all 281 national universities included in the ranking.

You'll notice that the University of California system holds four of the ten top spots, and this strong placement should have a footnote, namely that the "net cost" that plays such a big role in the ranking is going to be significantly higher for out-of-state students than for in-state.