Tis the season for college rankings...

[WilsonBlvdHoya]

and an interesting one comes out in Washington Monthly, which purports to measure the tax impact/return of schools by how "service-oriented" their graduates become (GU comes out #31). DFW's gonna love this because Tx A&M does very well (the magazine absolutely slams Emory as well for what it believes to be some very regressive admissions policies)....

www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0609.collegechart.html

[CWS]

A novel take on what matters in higher ed; I like the idea of trying to determine which schools actually serve the "common good," to use Catholic language. Georgetown has reason to be proud and pleased with the ranking.

The methodology is flawed. One of the criteria they use In determining which schools serve the public is "the number of PhDs awarded by the university in the sciences and engineering." No sense that humanities degrees could contribute to society's well-being. SFS students: you're not helping anything... at least according to this ranking.

No surprise then that if you look at the list, you'll see a lot of schools with strong engineering programs.

From what I know of the schools on the list, it seems that Georgetown is one of only three schools IN THE TOP 50 that do not have engineering programs: College of William and Mary, Georgetown, and Fordham.

Once you factor in the survey's silly preoccupation with engineering degrees, Georgetown actually come off looking very good: second rank among non-engineering schools (behind College of William and Mary).

Brown/Dartmouth/Columbia at 34/35/36; Syracuse at 62; George Washington at 69; Maryland at 79; Boston College at 104.

[SFHoya99]

They don't even measure the number of students that go into non-profits, or attempt to measure the % of grads who do charity work or give to charity in addition to their job.