Syracuse University is ranked No. 8 among 258 National Universities in the 2010 Washington Monthly College Rankings.
“While there are plenty of guides out there that help students and parents decide how to spend their tuition dollars wisely, there wasn’t one to tell citizens and policymakers which colleges were spending their tax dollars wisely,” Washington Monthly states in describing its rankings. “So we devised a way to measure and quantify how well individual colleges and universities were meeting their public obligations in the areas of Research, Service and Social Mobility.”
Washington Monthly defines Social Mobility as “recruiting and graduating low-income students;” Research as “producing cutting-edge scholarship and Ph.D.s;” and Service as “encouraging students to give something back to their country.”
For its rankings, the magazine breaks colleges and universities into five types—National Universities, Master’s Universities, Baccalaureate Colleges, Liberal Arts Colleges and Community Colleges.
SU does especially well (first among all National Universities) in a Service sub category in which the magazine measured “the number of staff supporting community service, relative to the number of staff; the number of academic courses that incorporate service, relative to school size; and whether the institution provides scholarships for community service.”
SU also has a high ranking in the Social Mobility category (seventh among National Universities) in a measure of students receiving Pell grants combined with the graduation rate of those students.
All of Washington Monthly’s criteria align very well with the University’s vision of Scholarship in Action, which is preparing SU students for the world, in the world.
The full rankings appear in the September/October issue of Washington Monthly and are online at http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/index.php.
The University of California at San Diego tops the Washington Monthly National Universities list. Along with SU, others in the top 10 are the University of California at Berkeley (No. 2), the University of California at Los Angeles (No. 3), Stanford University (No. 4), the University of Texas at Austin (No. 5), the University of California at Davis (No. 6), the University of Michigan (No. 7), Harvard University (No. 9) and the College of William and Mary (No. 10).
