In past we've noted that Washington Monthly does a completely different set of rankings for schools, based on categories they title Social Mobility, Research, and Service. UPS comes in at 121 of 201 colleges. While that may sound bad, according to their criteria schools like Reed come in at 106 and Lewis and Clark at 105. Where do we do well? How many of our students go on to get PhDs (we rank 40), and the number of alums in the Peace Corps (they give the rank as 7--what year this data is from I can't tell, though this year our rank was number one). We do less well in having many students on Pell Grants and also spending work-study money on community service. Read it here.
Probably the odder thing about these ratings is the way in which the schools can so radically shift from year to year--last year Reed was ranked 24. I'm not certain how much value one can get out of an evaluation system where many of the schools fluctuate so much from year to year (13 of the top twenty weren't in the top twenty last year, and many of those weren't anywere near it).
