The City Journal College Rankings

Higher education in America is in crisis. Many students still assume that schools like Harvard, Stanford, and Yale offer the best education simply because of their cultural prestige and professional networks.

“There’s a mismatch between reputation and reality,” write John D. Sailer and Kevin Wallsten. “Prospective students and parents lack access to the information they need to determine which school is best for them. As Americans rethink higher education, they need new tools to make better decisions.”

That’s why, in consultation with the National Association of Scholars, City Journal is introducing a new college ranking system. We collected data on 100 colleges and universities and used 68 different factors to shed new light on America’s most prominent schools. “To provide prospective students with a clearer picture of what they can expect from a particular school,” Sailer and Wallsten write, “we have developed a wide range of measures that capture dimensions of a college education that other rankings have long neglected.”

Read more about how we ranked the universities—and check out the list for yourself.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul has endorsed Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City.

“In making a deal with this far-left faction, Hochul believes that she’s making peace with Mamdani’s base in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA),” writes John Ketcham. “More likely, she’s sending herself and her fellow establishment Democrats down the road to socialism, posing national political challenges.”

Hochul could have kept Mamdani at arm’s length, Ketcham notes, reassuring residents and businesses that she wouldn’t let him pull the city too far to the left. Instead, her endorsement aligns her with a platform both wildly expensive and at odds with her promise not to raise taxes.

Read more about her Faustian bargain.

The Board of Regents, which oversees New York’s education system, plans to phase in new high school graduation requirements over the next five years. The Regents exam will become optional, allowing students to substitute alternative projects, such as participation in the arts. The board is also urging districts to adopt a new teaching model that shifts teachers’ roles from delivering direct instruction to guiding student projects.

These changes are alarming, given the dismal results of the 2024 National Assessment for Educational Progress, with just 35 percent of high school seniors scoring “proficient” in reading. And New York already has an example of education done right: the city’s charter schools.

“Black and Hispanic students in many of these schools, where enrollments are roughly 90 percent minority, outperform their traditional public school peers on state exams—sometimes by as much as 27 percentage points,” Roberta Rubel Schaefer writes. “The Regents should follow the charters’ lead and adopt proven teaching methods in traditional academic subjects.”

Read more here.

In his twenties, Ed Latimore worked nights as a security guard at a men’s homeless shelter. The job challenged many common assumptions about homelessness, he writes, especially the belief that most homeless men are veterans or mentally ill. In reality, the majority of the men he encountered were former convicts.

That means that subsidies alone won’t get people off the streets. “Policy reform can help,” Latimore says, “but the real solutions are ultimately personal: family stability, financial discipline, and responsibility.”

“It’s dreadful but not at all surprising that so many Democrats in Congress, so many college professors, and so many journalists consider this violent criminal to have been a greater loss to society than Charlie Kirk.”

Photo credit: Jon Lovette / Photodisc via Getty Images