The Foreign Service Journal, December 2014

62 DECEMBER 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT search information for a long time, and its website o ers practical college search tools, such as colleges listed by geography and major. Princeton Review has a list for every- thing: best campus food, best professors, etc. Both their books and their website are student-oriented. WashingtonMonthly came up with alternative rankings a few years ago, tout- ing a list that “asks not what colleges can do for you, but what colleges are doing for the country.” Washington Monthly ’s website states: “We rate schools based on their contribution to the public good in three broad categories: Social Mobility (recruiting and graduating low-income students), Research (producing cutting- edge scholarship and Ph.D.s) and Service (encouraging students to give something back to their country).” is year, they also included a list of worst colleges. Wintergreen Orchard House , one of the main compilers of statistics for institu- tions of higher learning, is a destination for data-heads and guidance counselors who want a complete library of college data and statistics. What About Global Rankings? In late October, U.S. News released a new ranking index of the 500 top univer- sities worldwide. Although many of the criteria used in the methodology remain subjective, such as “global reputation,” some of the U.S.-centric factors simply do not work when ranking schools in other countries, often because data such as selectivity are not measured by foreign universities. U.S. News relied heavily on omson- Reuters’ Academic Reputation Survey, which measures such factors as number of Although the media are making a fuss over the new U.S. News global rankings, London- based Times Higher Education has also been ranking global universities for years.