Paul Glastris

Your Harvard's, your Yale's, and so forth.

In our ranking, it's quite different.

When you measure things the way we measure it, for the average person and the average taxpayer, a lot of

mostly unsung state schools and small liberal arts colleges share the top 30 with the elite.

And in fact, the highest ranking elite school, Princeton, is number five on our rankings behind three California State University campuses, including Fresno State, number two.

And the number one school is probably a college

99% of your listeners and viewers have never heard of.

And that's Berea College in Berea, Kentucky.

And it's a fascinating school.

And there's all these hidden gems for people available at WashingtonMonthly.com that they're just not going to find on other rankings.

Well, funny story.

I used to work for U.S.

News for 10 years, so their college ranking was paying my mortgage.

I didn't work on the ranking, but it was part of what we did, and there was always within –

U.S.

news personnel a kind of sense that something was rotten in Denmark.

So when I took over the Washington Monthly some years later, we decided to do some investigative pieces about the U.S.

news rankings.

We found some pretty hinky stuff about their methodology.

And then we said, all right, smart guy, if you think you can do a better job, we gave ourselves the challenge of doing a better job.