America's Best Master's Universities and Baccalaureate Colleges

In the 130 years since it was founded, Tuskegee University has earned a notable place in the annals of higher education. Booker T. Washington was its first president. George Washington Carver taught there for forty years. It was where the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II trained. And it has produced a steady stream of accomplished alumni, including the novelist Ralph Ellison, the actor Keenan Ivory Wayans, and the musician Lionel Richie.

To this list of high honors, Tuskegee can now claim an additional, if more modest, one: it is first in this year’s Washington Monthly rankings of baccalaureate colleges. With 67 percent of its students receiving Pell Grants and a graduation rate 7 percentage points higher than predicted, Tuskegee ranks eleventh on our social mobility measure among baccalaureate colleges. It ranks second in the proportion of its students participating in ROTC. Its total research expenditures are more than double those of the next-highest college, and it is twenty-first in the percentage of graduates going on to get their PhD.

Yet when most people think of America’s top colleges, Tuskegee might not come to mind. Part of the reason is the category, “baccalaureate college,” to which it is relegated by the nonprofit Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The term refers to schools that focus on undergraduate education but offer fewer than half of their degrees in the liberal arts. Any organization that ranks schools based on Carnegie’s widely followed classification scheme—as do U.S. News & World Report and theWashington Monthly—is obliged to evaluate baccalaureate colleges in a separate category. But that makes it hard to tell how the best of those schools compete with better-known national universities and liberal arts colleges.

U.S. News makes drawing comparisons even more difficult by breaking up its ranking of baccalaureate colleges (which the magazine now calls “regional colleges”) into four separate regional groupings: North, South, West, and Midwest. Tuskegee ranks number five among “regional colleges” in the South. The publication gives the same treatment to “master’s universities,” a Carnegie classification encompassing schools that offer a range of undergraduate and some master’s-level programs but few doctoral degrees. How does the best master’s university in the Midwest stack up against the second best in the North? U.S. News won’t tell you.

So when we decided to rank master’s and baccalaureate institutions for the first time last year, we avoided U.S. News’s regional categories. We also, of course, evaluated the schools based on our own criteria (service, social mobility, and research) rather than those of U.S. News (fame, exclusivity, and money). Not surprisingly, there are some big differences in the results...

Read more from this article in the September/October 2011 issue of Washington Monthly.