763. ATTENDING A RURAL COLLEGE

So you said it.

I edit a magazine called Washington Monthly.

We've been around for 57 years.

We are a magazine of politics, governance, public policy out of the nation's capital.

Some of the most famous journalists you've heard of have learned in our sweatshop.

Yeah.

And we've been publishing this alternative college guide since 2005.

And it basically, it's the anti-U.S. news.

You know, U.S. news, to kind of overly simplify, rewards schools for being wealthy, prestigious, and exclusive.

Right.

it's sort of like being like a country club, but with lectures instead of golf.

That's the kind of schools that are at the top of U.S. news.

To be fair, some of

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.

serve their country.

So things like whether a student is, you know, whether school has a lot of ROTC members on their campus, whether they match the awards that AmeriCorps members, you know, National Service members get, whether they produce a lot of majors in that are socially valuable but somewhat underpaid, like social work, certain healthcare fields, whether they encourage their students to vote and have high voter registration.

And we think that's important because if you open the founding documents of almost every college, It says two things.

We are trying to bring economic bits to the community and country and prepare our students to be active members in society.

So we take colleges at their word about what their mission is.