these schools also have golf.

Yeah, and you can get in if you can golf, too, or play squash.

And many of them are great schools.

We don't measure that.

We measure schools primarily by what we call upward mobility.

Whether they recruit and graduate students of modest means, average students, working class students, with degrees that don't cost too much, don't load students up with too much debt, and bring in incomes after graduation that let them get into or stay in the middle class for better.

And also reward colleges for preparing students to be members of a democracy.

Do you want us to, why don't you share, what are some examples of colleges so we could kind of put it in a context of institutions across the country?

That's, that's-

So, so we have a stake in this thing.

And so we asked ourselves, what do students and taxpayers want from their dollars? And we said, all right, they basically want a college to be a place where somebody of modest means can get a degree that doesn't cost too much, doesn't load them down with too much debt, delivers a degree that brings in a middle-class income or better.

And that also encourages students to be active, good citizens.

Open the document, the founding document of just about any college in America, and you're gonna find words to the effect of, "The purpose of this university is to prepare our young people to enter, uh, their democracy and take their place and, and participate." So we actually measure that stuff.

We measure whether a college has, uh, you know, how many people, how many of the students are on ROTC serving their country.

Mm-hmm.

Um, th- you know, the tuition is not expensive.

That's, that's-

And so, so we have a stake in this thing.

And so we asked ourselves, what do students and taxpayers want from their dollars? And we said, all right, they basically want a college to be a place where somebody of modest means can get a degree that doesn't cost too much, doesn't load them down with too much debt, delivers a degree that brings in a middle-class income or better.

And that also encourages students to be active, good citizens.

Open the document, the founding document of just about any college in America, and you're gonna find words to the effect of, "The purpose of this university is to prepare our young people to enter, uh, their democracy and take their place and, and participate." So we actually measure that stuff.

We measure whether a college has, uh, you know, how many people, how many of the students are on ROTC serving their country.

Mm-hmm.

Um, th- you know, the tuition is not expensive.

Did it just come to you one day, Paul? Yeah.

Kind of, yeah.

You know, I keep pretty close tabs on this particular area of journalism, and noticed some years ago, no one ranks rural colleges.

And look, rural America has, as you know, taken it on the chin for years.

They've lost banks, employers, population.

It's tough in rural America.

And these colleges are the... load-bearing pillars of the economic and civic life of these towns and regions.

Is your sense that these colleges are an answer to that debt burden, or is it the same for them as it is for the urban universities?

Is that something that you're aware of or factored in? No.

For people like me who cover higher education, it has been long predicted.

It is here.

More or less this year is the beginning of it.

It's going to last for many years.

They're predicting a 15% drop in the number of high school students compared to the past.

And it's already beginning to have its feel.

Is there any way that we can recover from this or let alone reverse it?

Mm-hmm.

It's still too high, uh, but it's not growing, and so that's a little piece of good news.

Um, another piece of good news, um, the, the college benefit of going to college, uh, peaked some years ago, but it's stayed at a very high level.

Uh, a bachelor's degree still earns you 70% more, uh, than not having one.

So, uh, and, and, and number three, even with AI, the demand for bachelor's degrees is likely to grow.

So, so, you know, obviously AI does throw a wrench in everybody's predictions.

Um, and then let me give you one more piece of, uh, potentially good news, depending on your, your view of things.

It's about a sense of inventiveness and curiosity that the humanities really encourages.

and the problems of uh universities today particularly when people are asking the basic question is it worth it is it demonstrable that my son or daughter are going to get much farther ahead in a profession in doing this uh are going to college or particularly there's so many jobs out there do not require college degrees uh is it worth it uh your assessment in looking through and doing the populist list here for the second year in a row looking at all the data particularly all this new data that was available, sir.

Yeah, Syracuse is a great example of colleges that, especially true of private colleges, they cost more.

Students don't have the money.

They have to discount to get those students to come in.

If they discount too much, they don't bring in enough revenue to cover their costs.

If they don't discount enough, the students don't accept the offer and they don't have enough students to fill the seats.

And that is happening all over the country.

So where do people go to get the magazine, the rankings, particularly the rural, if they're so inclined, and to really dive into this, see all the articles you've got?

Why did you think there was a need for another list? And why did you guys then spend all the time and effort to go through all the data to put it together?

Well, Steve, thanks for having me on again this year.

Look, let's say you want to go to dinner, right? And you look at the local listings of best restaurants.

What if all the top 30 were membership-only country clubs? You'd say, well, I don't know.

Maybe it's possible the food's better there, but what good does that do me? I can't get into those places.

That's U.S. News.

That's the Wall Street Journal.

I mean, this is, but how do you adjust for not running off to New York city right after you graduate and, and, and trying to make it there? Did you, did you factor that in?

You seem like you're just the perfect guy for the moment because I will get to a lot of what you're doing in the Washington Monthly, which is some interesting reporting and talking about... academics and um uh the high wire act of uh academics at the highest levels these days particularly but we'll get to that in a second uh i want to ask you about the the chess match that's going on in washington around closing the government and if you can just take a measure of that for us

i'm going to try i'm not sure i even understand it it is a three-dimensional chess and The latest is that the president, having refused to even sit down with the Democrats, now is bringing the leader of the minority in the House and the Senate in with the majority leaders to hash over a plan.

What the White House wants is to just have an extension for a couple of months month and a half, really, so that they can pass some full bills.

And the Republicans are saying, look, we're not asking for any major changes in policy.

We just want time.

What the Democrats are saying is you've frozen us out of all the negotiations.

The very least that we want is extension of health care coverage.

And then I have a bigger question about higher learning generally, but we'll get to that.

What is this college guide about, uh, and what does it tell us?

So this is the 20th anniversary...

Thanks for having me on, by the way.

20th anniversary of the, of the Washington Monthly College, uh, Guide and Rankings.

This year we redid our methodology to put an even finer point on what we think, uh, college rankings, which we think are important, but the dozen of them that are out there, especially US News, totally miss what's important about, uh, college rankings.

Um, you know, it-Our college rankings are about the value for average students, students from modest means, students who are poor, who are working class.

Um, and they're also for the taxpayers.

You actually lay it out that, "Hey, there's a whole world out here that you don't have to pay 100,000 bucks a year, uh, if you really want an education." Tell me about your journey.

But give us a sense of like, you know, w- where you are within that, that spectrum of w- of the broader Democratic party.

So, you know, The Washington Monthly is kind of issue-specific politically.

As you said, we're, we, you know, we're...

We focus on policy solutions and political reality, not ideology, and so on some things we're pretty, you know, moderate or even conservative.

Other things we're quite wildly lefty.

Um, it all depends kind of on the issue.

Um, I would say that a lot of the, uh, i- abundance folks are a little bit the same way.

And I think they would argue, well, this is what's problematic with regulations, being weaponized by wealthy interests, um, whether it's the Koch brothers who don't want, uh, you know, uh, the, the, the Purple Line in, uh, in, in where is it? Um, uh-