In the space of a little more than a week this past June, two university presidents revealed just how cynical they're willing to be.

First, Clemson University President James F. Barker admitted to rating Clemson as the single greatest university in America—better than Harvard, Yale, or any other—when he filled out the reputational survey that drives the annual U.S. News & World Report college rankings. Soon after, a newspaper investigation uncovered similar shenanigans at the University of Florida, where President Bernie Machen ranked his institution as equal to the Ivies while downgrading all other public institutions in Florida as mediocre at best.

Some see these episodes as further evidence for abolishing college rankings altogether. We disagree. Dishonesty and bad behavior in the face of public scrutiny is understandable but never excusable. Students paying large and ever-growing amounts of money to attend college need comparative information to help them make smart choices. When colleges object to rankings in principle, they're really just looking to avoid accountability and healthy competition. U.S. News has the right idea—they're just using the wrong data, ranking colleges with crude, easily manipulated measures like alumni giving rates, class size, and that vague survey of reputation. It's good that university presidents care enough about rankings to lie so shamelessly. We just need rankings that create incentives for presidents to actually improve their institutions, rather than pretend to.

Higher education, moreover, isn't something that only seventeen-year-olds and their parents need to worry about. In the information age, we all depend on colleges and universities to produce groundbreaking research and new inventions, to serve as engines of social mobility for first-generation college students, and to mold the minds of future leaders. And we all pay for it—colleges receive enormous amounts of public money through direct subsidies and tax breaks every year. In other words, we need more than just good college rankings for prospective students—we need good college rankings for everyone else.

And that's what the Washington Monthly College Rankings aim to provide: a measure of not just what colleges can do for you, but what colleges are doing for the country. To compile the list, we gathered reams of publicly available data and settled on three criteria: social mobility, research, and service. In our eyes, America's best colleges are those that work hardest to help economically disadvantaged students earn the credentials that the job market demands. They're the institutions that contribute new scientific discoveries and highly trained PhDs. They're the colleges that emphasize the obligations students have to serve their communities and the nation at large.

From that perspective, higher education excellence starts to take on a very different meaning than what the status- and money-obsessed institutions that routinely round out the top of the U.S. News list represent. In fact, only one of the U.S. News top ten—Stanford—makes our top ten, while some of our highest-ranked schools are buried by U.S. News in the magazine's lowest tiers.

Read the entire introduction to The Washington Monthly's annual college guide.

Also read The Washington Monthly's College Rankings, including the Methodology and Carey's article "College for $99 a Month."