It’s been a tough three years since Susan Henking was installed as president of Shimer College, the tiny Great Books school embedded on high-tech IIT’s Bronzeville campus.
On another of Miller’s lists—this one giving equal weight to student cost, debt, loan defaults, and graduation rates—Shimer was ranked the 16th worst out of 20.
The magazine has been compiling lists of the best colleges and universities in America since 2005, evaluating schools not on “expense, luxury, and exclusivity” but on what they’re “doing for the country,” as measured by social mobility, research, and public service. The results are very different from, say, U.S. News and World Report‘s: Northwestern, for example, ranked number 13 by U.S. News, failed to break the top 100 on Washington Monthly‘s 2014 ranking of national universities.
This points to a larger problem, says Henking. “If somebody goes to another college for a year, and comes to Shimer . . . and graduates in four years, that person will neither show up on Shimer’s data nor on the data for the other college. That person’s never counted. This is part of the controversy about ratings, because the vast majority of the 17 million people who go to college these days don’t get all their credits from the same institution. So the push to evaluate us all on things like graduation rate, while it’s a reasonable goal, isn’t really counting who moves through a place.”
