Bonus episode: Re-evaluating American Higher-Ed – with Reihan Salam and Kevin Wallstern

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The university that we have today is the product of the Cold War, this massive expansion of higher education, and this massive expansion of federal subsidies.

The idea behind that massive expansion of public investment in higher education was the idea that we were going to have a compact between higher education and our democracy and our republic.

But what's actually happened is that you have people who are professional activists that are notionally about educating that instead become about indoctrinating.

It's 6.30 p.m. on Saturday, November 29th here in New York City.
Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving and Shavuatov. it is 1.30 a.m.

on Sunday, November 30th in Israel, where Israelis are beginning a new week.

Today, Saturday, the IDF announced the Chief of Staff Ayel Zemir will appoint a panel of experts who will investigate the military's handling of intelligence reports received since 2018, which included signs of Hamas's intent to launch a wide-scale attack across the Gaza border.

This comes amid a public feud between Zamir and Defense Minister Yisrael Katz over probes into the military failures surrounding October 7th.

On Thursday, Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Chairman Boaz Bismuth unveiled his long-awaited revision of a government-backed bill that would ensure the continuation of military exemptions for ultra-Orthodox or Haredi yeshiva students, while ostensibly increasing conscriptions among graduates of those seminaries.

The proposed legislation removes removes provisions from earlier drafts intended to ensure that those registered for yeshiva are actually studying and cancels all sanctions on draft evaders when they turn 26.

The proposal has drawn heavy criticism from those who have been pushing for more stringent measures to be taken against these draft evaders. Now on to today's episode.

Over the past few years, many Americans have been struck by what they see as a staggering deterioration within elite higher education, from the explosion in anti-Semitism on too many American campuses to the entrenchment of wrong-headed DEI policies, as well as the intellectual monoculture at many campuses that some parents only first became dialed into when their kids were home, taking classes virtually during COVID lockdowns.

Many Americans have begun to doubt the real value of an elite college degree.

Well, last month, the Manhattan Institute, one of the nation's top public policy think tanks, launched its inaugural college rankings list called the 2025 City Journal College Rankings.

It takes into account various factors that other popular rankings often don't.

The Wall Street Journal editorialized on the rollout of these new rankings, and I quote here from the journal: The outrages of cancel culture and anti-Semitism have brought a rare gust of accountability to campus.

Students and their families want to know what they're getting for their pricey tuition, and fresh rankings can offer an alternative to the conventional educational wisdom. Close quote.

Yes, these new rankings consider the intellectual and ideological diversity of the students and the faculty at each of the universities it evaluates.

It considers what courses are being offered and what is actually being taught in the classroom. Imagine that.

Because all the traditional rankings that we've all been following for decades don't consider these factors, which one would think are pretty important factors, perhaps the most important factors.

To discuss this new ranking system, how they developed it, and some of the universities, you may be surprised to see at the top of the rankings, we are joined by Raihan Salam and Kevin Walson, both of whom are with the Manhattan Institute.

Raihan, who joined me recently to discuss the rise of Zoran Mamdani, is the president of the Manhattan Institute. He previously served as the executive editor of National Review.

He's a prolific writer and author of several books. Kevin holds a doctoral degree in political science from UC Berkeley.

He's a professor of political science at California State University, and he is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Raihan Salam and Kevin Walston on reevaluating American colleges.

This is Call Me Back.

And I'm pleased to welcome back to the podcast, Raihan Salam, and for the first time, Kevin Walsard. Kevin, Raihan, thanks for being here.
Thanks for having us, Dan. Ryan, let me start with you.

I described in the introduction that these rankings were a project of the Manhattan Institute, a NFC Journal, and they're getting a lot of attention.

But before we get into the details of the rankings, I thought maybe you could just give a big picture overview of the college application process and where these rankings fit in.

Because I do think the rankings are kind of like unique in terms of how crazy people here are about these rankings. It's like a uniquely U.S.
phenomenon.

So can you just describe the process and the rankings and the role the rankings have been playing in the conversation about which colleges are worthwhile or elite and which ones aren't? Absolutely.

So, you know, the United States, we have thousands of institutions of higher education, but this is a really hierarchical system in which Michigan State wants to be more like the University of Michigan.

The University of Michigan wants to be more like Harvard.

And this is this really powerful way in which a small handful of institutions that are seen as elite are shaping the larger universe of higher education in our country.

And through that, the larger culture of our country, the larger intellectual sensibilities, even the policy and political direction of our country.

That might sound grandiose, but higher education is really that. important.

You know, part of it's a question of the immense resources that are directed, but it's also about the college admissions process.

Dan, you know, you have kids about of college age, right, who are going through this process themselves. And you know the immense anxiety of this process.

You know that when a college admissions officer at Yale or at Swarthmore or at Cal Berkeley or what have you, when they have a theory of what they think their ideal student looks like, that actually has an effect on everything.

That has an effect on which preschool Kevin Walston or Dan Senor want to send their kids to, right? You want to send them to the feeder school.

You want to send them to the place that's going to get them a leg up in the process.

So, what we at the Manhattan Institute have come to believe is that higher education matters so much, not just for fostering opportunity and upward mobility, that matters a huge amount, but also for so many other things about the shape of our culture, the shape of our country.

And that means that, of course, we do a lot of policy work on higher education.

We're seeking to reform higher education in various ways, you know, whether it's how you finance higher education, you the content, the curriculum and what have you.

But you've really got to think about the hierarchy itself. What counts as being a great institution and what doesn't count as being a great institution? And that's where those rankings come in.

These rankings, to be clear, these are not tablets coming down from Sinai, right? Like a couple of institutions, U.S. News and World Reporters, one, there may be one or two others have

kind of... established themselves.
These are commercial enterprises, I should add. They have established themselves as the ranking.
So you hear young people and families say, oh,

University X is the third best university in America today. And you're like, what? According to who? And they're like, U.S.
News and World Report.

And it's like, and they talk about it like with such specificity, like they come on from high. So can you just talk about that?

Like what has happened here where these, you know, a couple of places have kind of had somewhat of a monopoly on the rankings business. You know this and your audience is a global audience.

In a lot of countries, you know, you base it on, you got the top score on some national college entrance examination. Or in Canada, hey, everyone goes to a big public university.

In the United States, it's a lot of it is built on reputation. The U.S.
News and World Report, even the Wall Street Journal, there's a slew of these ranking systems out there.

And a lot of what they're doing is actually asking people in the higher education industry, you know, what is your assessment of, you know, which institutions are high status, high prestige.

So it actually winds up being this weirdly circular method in which you're saying that these are the institutions that have been considered really selective and great, you know, for a million years.

And lo and behold, you know, those schools at the top of U.S. News World Report, they don't actually change that much.

And when you get under the hood of what they're actually measuring, and this is something Kevin knows more about than anybody, you know, actually sometimes that's not really things of substance.

It'll be things like, oh, how many classes do you have that are, you know, have this student-teacher ratio or something like that.

It's not really things that get at the things that students, families, you know, really are going to care about the most. They're not necessarily focused on the real value add.

They're not necessarily focused on whether or not you're learning real critical thinking skills, whether you're in an environment where you're going to be exposed to real ideological diversity.

It's not really about whether or not your student is going to learn how to think. It's much more about this ballast of the reputation that you've already built up over time.

And that goes to the fact, Dan, that it's a commercial product. So to some degree, I mean, I don't want to be unfair.
I don't want to besmirch our rivals here.

But to some degree, it's just, hey, does that ranking make sense to me? Does it make sense that Harvard or Princeton or Yale or wherever is going to be, you know, the top 10?

What we tried to do is really flip that.

We tried to think about what actually matters when you're thinking about forming young adults, putting them in a position to really succeed and thrive in a pluralistic democracy.

What do we really care about to create a different race to the top? Because if U.S.

News from World Report or the Wall Street Journal or what have you, they're creating a race towards, okay, let's gain the system of our student-teacher ratios and what have you.

We wanted to say, hey, let's encourage these universities to compete along a different axis that's actually going to lead to better institutions and also a better system of higher education more broadly nationally.

All right. So, Kevin, I want to get into these rankings.

You were the one that first started really working on it, and I want to ask you the origin story of the rankings. Like, what catalyzed the idea for the rankings?

Was it a post-October 7th crackup where so many players and so many people and so many leaders and so many parents and students were looking around saying some of these universities are really, really, despite their high rankings and their status, are a really, really bad fit for what we want for our child or what a student may want out of their college experience?

Or did the crackup go back as far? My sense is some of it went back to COVID, where many of these college students came home and they were studying via Zoom. They're taking their classes via Zoom.

And parents, for the first time, almost, because they were all quarantining, sheltering together, they were actually had eyes on or some exposure to what their kids were actually learning and were horrified, despite their kids being at some of these, what they thought were very prestigious universities.

So I guess at what point were you, did you start zeroing in on there's a crackup happening, there's demand for more information, there's the demand for new measurements and metrics, and we're going to do this?

Yeah, I think it was clear. There's sort of a longer-term story and a short-term story about why we started working on these rankings.

I think the longer-term trend is it's been clear for some time that U.S. News and World Report in particular and these other ranking schemes aren't serving their consumers particularly well.

Anybody who pays any attention to the news is seeing this sort of never-ending parade of stories that are quite embarrassing, they're concerning, they're horrifying even for families, parents in particular.

And yet the U.S. News and World Report rankings never change.
You can track these over time. You go back to the 90s.

And basically, if you're looking between 1990 and 2025, you're going to see exactly the same schools in exactly the same spots.

And this makes no sense to your average parent or even your average young person who pays any attention to the world of higher education.

How can it be that we see this never-ending, again, stream of embarrassing stories coming out, these weird courses, the president said this or that, this person was caught for plagiarism, and somehow the rankings never move.

So there's this disconnect between what we understand to be the sort of traditional reputation that is codified in these rankings and what people's gut sense is telling them.

And I will say there's sort of a personal element to this as well. As I've gotten a little older, I'm a parent myself, and I know a lot of people who are parents sending their kids to college.

I noticed that, again, the rankings don't serve their

consumers all that that well. They're not providing the information that's needed.

And one thing I noticed is that a lot of organizations are doing quite good work trying to investigate what's really going on in universities, but they do it in a highly piecemeal fashion.

You might be able to track down something about the speech code of a campus by looking at fires data. It's a foundation for individual rights in education, just for our listeners to know.

Exactly, yeah.

And, you know, you might be able to find something about campus anti-Semitism by looking at the ADL, and you might be able to learn a little something about some of the curriculum by looking at work that's been done by the American Council for Trustees and Alumni.

But trying to track down all of this information as it's scattered across the internet became sort of a full-time job in itself.

And so, the initial intuition was: can we build a ranking system that sort of aggregates in a single place all of these really great measures that other people are putting together on their own in response to the crisis going on in higher education?

And we started with that. Now, again, we're not saying that U.S.
News and World Report or Wall Street Journal, Washington Monthly have nothing to offer for prospective students or their families.

What we're saying is what they offer an incomplete picture, a narrow picture, a sort of reductive picture.

They look at input factors or sometimes output, but they're missing the black box of education, what happens for four years while you're on campus.

And what we wanted to do, again, was take the insights of previous ranking systems. We think those things matter.
It's important, of course, if you get a good job, if there's a high ROI.

It matters whether, you know, other good students, let's say, are attending the university.

But what we wanted to do is take a lot of the work that some smaller organizations have done and build that along with a set of novel or independent measures that would really, for the first time, provide what we think is a holistic evaluation of what it's like to attend this university for four years.

Are you going to have a good experience or a bad experience?

experience when considering, again, yes, intellectual diversity, political diversity, social experience, and all these other aspects of a college education that are paramount, again, for young people today.

Okay, so Kevin, I want to stay on that because I've been interested in higher education.

Obviously, I have sons who are getting closer in age where this is going to become a real part of their lives, but I've been interested in higher education for some time.

And when I looked at these rankings over the years,

it struck me that there was no attempt to understand, to your point, what's actually going on in the curriculum.

This is kind of crazy because the primary mission of colleges, what parents are supposed to be paying for, or what students are going into debt for, is an education. Quaint notion, I know.

But one thing I think many parents and smart students take seriously is what actually is happening in the classroom.

I honestly, when I hear people talk about these different elite colleges, I never hear them talking about what is actually happening in the classroom.

And I would suspect it's probably something hard to measure.

So how does your ranking attempt to get under the hood and measure some or to the extent all of what's going on in the classroom and within the curriculum?

Yeah, it was one of the primary motivations of doing this ranking. And, you know, you hit the nail on the head.

The reason why this hasn't been included in previous rankings is because it's incredibly difficult to do. It's far easier to take these numbers,

some of which Rayon pointed out, student to faculty ratio or, you know, how much is spent on research. Those are all federally reported numbers.
It's really easy to do.

It's easy to look at outcomes, alumni earnings, or graduation rate, or retention rate. Nobody's attempted to look at curriculum because it's the hardest thing to do.

And so what we wanted to do is tackle that very difficult question really for the first time. No other ranking scheme is attempting to do that.
So we have a couple different ways of going about that.

And again, we've drawn on work that others have done and we've sort of built up and extended beyond that. So one thing we do is look at the general education requirements.

So what are the courses that you need to take in order to graduate? And some of this work was done by the American Council on Trustees and Alumni.

They look at things like, do you have to take government and history in order to graduate?

A shockingly small number of universities actually require this, a sort of foundational course, something that we probably assume.

Again, for people who aren't paying careful attention to higher ed, they probably assume, of course, you have to know something about government.

Of course, you have to know something about American history to graduate. Again, when you actually look at what courses are required to graduate for a lot of our universities, you won't find this.

So the first thing we do is we look at, again, what are the basic requirements? Do you have to take math? Do you have to take science? Do Do you have to take a foreign language?

Do you have to take history? We look at that part of the curriculum.

On the sort of other side, how many universities are requiring that you take diversity courses or diversity trainings in order to graduate?

This is an area, again, where there's been a lot of movement recently.

Go back five years, a lot of schools started implementing these requirements. They started building them into the curriculum.
Some are rolling back now.

But what we wanted to do is capture the extent to which, again, universities are requiring people to take DEI courses.

One thing that we're very serious about about including in our ranking, something we really want to acknowledge, is a curricular reform focusing on American civics, a history of American assault.

We wanted to reward those institutions that had taken the lead in pursuing centers, programs, sometimes departments.

Can you give some examples of what you mean by teaching civics and making a requirement? What would be an example of a class or classes?

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, a couple of universities, Arizona State first, but other universities have followed suit.

University of Florida, University of North Carolina, UT Austin, have built dedicated departments for teaching what they call civic thought.

And this is a very exciting area, I think, of development for universities, of reform.

These schools of civic thought really attempt to do four separate things, all of which I think are crucially important for as we think about universities today.

The first thing they attempt to do is they attempt to contextualize American ideals and American institutions and sort of broader concerns about the challenge of self-governance.

It is again surprising the extent to which many universities have ignored what we would assume to be a fundamental part of their mission and these schools of civic thought attempt to do that.

So they will have courses again on everything ranging from the Federalist Papers to the great books curriculum. They're usually the second thing they do is they're usually interdisciplinary.

disciplinary. So they're going to draw on philosophy, they're going to draw on literature, they're going to draw on the social sciences quite extensively.

But what they're attempting to do is take a lot of these departments that have become maybe too siloed and draw together their insights in a sort of curriculum that will hopefully lead to students who are up to the challenge of self-governance.

They usually, these departments focus or run programs on civil discourse.

So you might think about that, how to tackle conversations that are difficult, particularly in times of political polarization.

And then finally, these departments are doing quite well at providing some measure of intellectual or viewpoint diversity within the broader campus because the fact is, the sad fact perhaps, is that mostly these topics we're talking about, whether we're talking about classic questions in political philosophy or, you know, the sort of development of economic systems like capitalism, these are areas of inquiry that are mostly interesting to conservatives at this point.

So one way to deal with the viewpoint diversity problem on campus, again, is to support these centers.

And our rankings, again, give heavy weight to schools who have courageously, I think, attempted to reform in this direction. But you mentioned UT Austin.

My understanding is UT Austin, University of Texas at Austin, they not only have this School of Civic Leadership that you're talking about, but they also have, my understanding is they're introducing a mandatory, I don't know if it's for the next coming school year, sometime in the near future, a mandatory freshman year requirement that, like, of course, an introduction to Western civilization, I think, heavy emphasis, I think, on U.S.

history. So that this is a requirement that the thousands of students across the university in freshman year have to take.
It's not just these select schools.

It's not like these select departments like the Hamilton School at the University of Florida or the School of Civic Leadership of Texas, but there's also an effort to make this a mandatory requirement across the university.

Yeah, that's true. But again, they stand out because they are unique in this way.
Forgive me, Kevin.

Just one other thing to keep in mind is that, you know, when you're looking at Florida, the Hamilton Center is not, as you note, merely a school on campus.

They're creating a large number of tenure-line faculty positions because not only are they going to be a resource for all of the undergraduate students on campus, they're also planning to use this as an institution that is going to help change public education at the K-12 level across the state.

This is a really big, ambitious effort, but to narrow the point to what Kevin was raising, that's a really big deal. The idea is not that these are going to be little isolated silos on campus.

The idea is that they're actually bringing to the forefront, bringing to the center of undergraduate instruction, the idea that we want to have a grounding.

We want to have, as Kevin put it, the idea of teaching, preparing young people, young adults for self-government. We wanted that to be at the heart of what the modern university does.

Okay, so then a question to either of you.

So your rankings reward schools that are doing these things that you're describing, generally speaking, and I hate to make you generalize, but just for the sake of this conversation, when these kinds of classes and this kind of curricula come into the universities, what will it be supplanting?

Like, what has taken over many of these universities that has not allowed a space to do the kind of learning that you're describing here?

Well, I know Kevin is going to have a lot of thoughts on this as someone who's really in the trenches in academia.

I'll just briefly say that the university that we have today is the product of the Cold War, this massive expansion of higher education, and this massive expansion of federal subsidies.

The idea behind that massive expansion of public investment in higher education was the idea that we were going to have a compact between higher education and our democracy and our republic.

You know, how is it that we are advancing the national interest? What is it that we are instilling in our young?

But what's actually happened is that you had a lot of higher education institutions, and here I am generalizing, you basically had these very cosseted, very narrow fields.

You have an emphasis not on teaching and shaping the rising generation, but rather a real emphasis on going deeper and deeper into these ideological silos.

You have departments that are totally undersubscribed when it comes to actually enrolling undergraduate students. To be specific, what do you mean by that, Ryan?

I mean, I think I know what you mean, but I want to be direct so our listeners understand. Let's be really direct.
I don't want to put words in Kevin's mouth, but I'll just say it myself.

If you're looking at a lot of niche fields, the ethnic studies, the blank studies departments that emerged in this kind of post-60s, 70s environment, where basically you have people who are not engaged in what we think of as kind of classic open intellectual inquiry, where we want a range of voices, where we want people who are serious, thoughtful scholars.

You have people who are activists.

You have people who are professional activists who are burrowing into these institutions that are notionally about educating that instead become about indoctrinating.

You have faculty members who use their role in faculty governance in order to wage turf battles, in order to really fixate on how they're reproducing themselves and their own ideology, rather than thinking about what should be the mission of the university.

So I think that that is something that you're seeing both among super selective schools, but also less selective schools as well.

You have these departments, you have faculty members who are so ideological that they're not really thinking about pedagogy first and foremost.

They're thinking about the ways in which they want to transform the larger political and policy scene, using these as beachheads for shaping our culture, not shaping our culture in the direction of freedom of expression, open inquiry, rigor, academic excellence.

And by the way, this ideological turn also has a lot to do with the rise of grade inflation.

Because if you're an academic who's there to propagandize or there to advance an activist purpose, you're not going to go through the headache of actually giving a student a C minus when that's what they deserve.

So it's something that really fails the student, something that I know is a big motivator for a lot of people right now.

The sense that I was talking to a young man earlier today, a graduate of an elite university, a university that's in the top five on U.S.

News and World Report, and he was talking about how hard he worked, how much time he devoted to writing an A paper in a government class, and then seeing his roommate, who did virtually no work at all, have a paper that was totally marked up something that was you know really abysmal getting an a-

this is something that is incredibly demoralizing and dispiriting and for you as a taxpayer for you as someone who has invested in the idea that we invest in higher education for a good reason that's demoralizing for you too the only way that pervasive grade inflation really makes sense is if you're thinking that the mission of the university is not to prepare young adults for the rigors of self-government or the rigors of building a great life it's if you think of this as a vehicle to achieve some other objectives beyond the pedagogical purpose, beyond the perspective of how is it that we use the university to advance the national interest.

And I think that that's something that we really have seen that's been really corrupting and undermining. All right.
I want to quote here.

The Wall Street Journal did a piece, an editorial on your guys' rankings. It was an excellent editorial.
We'll link to it in the show notes. But I just want to quote here.

The Wall Street Journal writes, the Manhattan Institute City Journal looked at 100 colleges, assessing them on qualities that many students and families are concerned about, including free speech, the school's approach to politics on campus, and students' professional success after graduation.

Schools that have demonstrated ideological pluralism among the faculty received higher marks. Same for a vibrant and inclusive campus social life.

Student tolerance for controversial speakers was another plus. So These are really interesting categories, Kevin.

I mean, like how one measures ideological pluralism on campus, how one measures an inclusive campus social life. I don't even know what that means.
So I guess, how did you arrive at these categories?

I mean, they're very intriguing to me, but they're also very hard to measure. So how do you think about these categories? I guess that's my first question.

And are there any others that are what I would call kind of, I put in the quirky, but interesting? And actually, as you think about them, they actually wind up being really revealing.

Yeah, we wanted to cast a wide net here and we wanted to acknowledge the many ways in which your experience on a campus might be colored by the kinds of people you're around, the kinds of beliefs they have, and the opportunities, let's say, to engage both with like-minded people, but also with people who have different views than you.

So we started with this basic idea that, you know, a good school, a good campus, a place where you're going to get a good education is going to be rich in terms of what in the sort of sociological literature is called benign forms of belonging.

These are kinds of relationships that you have, again, friends, families, connections with your community based on shared hobbies professional interests pursuits activities and so forth these are are areas again where traditional rankings like u.s news and world report will have nothing to say they'll have nothing to offer and so once we realized that this was going to be a core part of any sort of average person's consideration about where should i go what will i encounter when i get on campus then it just became a question of how do we best measure this and and in surveying the landscape, a lot of organizations have attempted to do this.

Again, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression does this extensive survey of college students. They look at 250 colleges and universities.
They give them survey questions.

They ask, you know, where would you place yourself on this sort of ideological continuum? How often do you self-censor? How often do you feel offended on campus?

You know, they ask questions about basic political tolerance. Would you support this or that kind of offensive speaker giving a speech on campus? campus.

And so what we did is we took a lot of those measures that were collected by them and we brought them into our ranking scheme.

We wanted to highlight, now I want to be really clear, this is not, our measures are not how conservative is the student body. Our measures are how balanced is the student body.

This is not a measure of who's most conservative, but instead we think balance is the key. So we just look at a simple metric of what's the ratio of liberal to conservative students.

Now, in our hundred universities, I will point out, there's only a single university where conservatives are a majority of the student body. And how do they measure that?

How do you measure liberal students versus conservative students? Yeah, so we have two ways of thinking about ideological diversity.

The first of which, which I just discussed, is just self-reported ideology, right? We just ask people a question. Where would you place yourself on this liberal to conservative continuum?

And as I said, on that measure, we have 81 universities out of our 100 where liberals are the majority. So you're talking about a student, that means 50% or more.

You know, in nearly every other university, there's more liberals than conservatives. They might might not constitute the majority, but we think ideological balance is crucial for a whole sort of.

Can I stay on this for a second? Because this is very interesting to me.

Because I'm seeing now more and more among younger students who aspire to, you know, go to a top college education, I'm seeing, and some of it's anecdotal, but not all anecdotal, I'm seeing more and more conservative leanings among them.

And that's like a newer thing. And you're saying that this isn't shocking, at most of the top schools, say at the top of the U.S.

News and World Report rankings, you would say based on your methodology, it would reveal that the overwhelming majority of students at these top schools are liberal, which means you're not saying they all need to be conservative, but you're just saying A, they're not balanced, and B, they don't reflect necessarily where a number of top performing students who want to get into great colleges are ideologically.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in our hundred schools, right, there are more schools that have fewer than 10% conservative students than there are schools with more conservative than liberal students.

I mean, we're talking about, again, this incredibly important dimension. Now, I will point out that you might say, well, why do you care?

And we think there's sort of value in and of itself, intrinsic value in exposure to competing viewpoints. But you also see that reflected in our data.

When you start looking at where places are where students self-censor most, where they feel most comfortable, you're going to find that actually those schools with more ideological balance are also producing better speech climates.

And we wanted to emphasize every part of that. Now, again, I think one of the challenges of measurement, back to your point, Dan, is how do you go about really getting at this?

And wherever we could, we wanted to measure these really important concepts in a variety of ways. So we actually did an extensive census of student organizations across all 100 of our campuses.

We went to their websites. We looked at all the organizations that are offered.

We think it's important to have a sort of dense organizational network that students can tap into when they attend these universities.

And we wanted to code, again, these organizations for whether they're right-leaning or left-leaning.

And it could be the case that perhaps, you know, you're at a university with very few conservative students, but if there's a sort of rich organizational life of conservative clubs and groups that you can join, maybe it's not so bad.

So we also measured that as part of our data. You know, is there a sort of severe imbalance organizationally when it comes to these opportunities to participate in campus life?

And that's part of our measure as well.

So we tried to struggle with some of these challenges of measurement in the best way that we could to really give, again, students and their parents a sense of if I attend this university, am I going to be sort of locked away in this sort of ideological echo chamber where I'm constantly self-censoring?

Or can I actually

realize, let's say, the benefits of being exposed to all of these other students from around the country. What we're really trying to get at is how do you learn from your peers?

And, you know, our argument would basically be embedded in our methodology is that if you really want a good educational experience, one that will prepare you for the society broadly, you do not want to embed yourself in a campus where 90% of the students and 95% of the faculty are on the left.

This is actually not going to prepare you all that well for dealing with big challenges facing a politically polarized and very vast and diverse in all sorts of ways country.

I encourage our listeners to look at the rankings. There are some conclusions that are obviously very much at odds with the conventional views of prestige and status in higher education.

I guess my question for either of you, for both of you, is what surprised you the most?

When you go through this process, you don't know exactly what's going to come out on the other end once you endeavor something like this. What has surprised you the most? Ryan, I'll start with you.

One thing that I was really struck by is

how big and visible the advantage that you see for big public institutions in the Southeast.

So if you're looking at the top of the rankings, you've got the University of Florida, you've got UT Austin, UNC, Chapel Hill, Texas AM, you've got Georgia Tech that's very high up there.

And one thing that I'm really struck by is that when you look at Texas and Florida, for example, these are states that people think of as hard right, bright red states, but these are also states that have really

big urban centers that are very progressive, you know, that are very blue.

These are also states, Texas and Florida, that really stand out when you look at K-12 education and how well they're doing relative to New York and California and a lot of other bright blue states when it comes to educating black and brown students.

If you look at educational outcomes in K-12, in those states, they rank in the top five consistently.

And it's really striking because, you know, Florida, again, the stereotype is, you know, Florida, MAGA, retirees, hard right, you know, all of this.

But actually, Florida is a state that is so demographically vibrant. You have this huge number of young people.

And it's really exciting and encouraging to see that the University of Florida is an institute, a flagship university that actually is diverse, but not diverse because they're racially bean-counting people, but it's diverse because it's culturally diverse, politically, ideologically diverse.

And yes, it so happens that there's a very large number of students who are first and second generation.

Students, you know, whose ancestors didn't come over on the Mayflower, but they're building this really exciting civic intellectual culture that really feels like something exciting and viable for the future.

UT Austin has a new provost.

And again, this was kind of after the fact, after these rankings were put together, but this guy, Willen Bowden, who who is someone who is a higher education lifer, but a really serious and thoughtful person who, you know, he might be a conservative, but he's someone who's really invested in higher education and making it succeed, making it viable.

These are not people who want to burn it all down.

These are people who actually want to renew and replenish these institutions, make them relevant, and restore the legitimacy of selective higher education.

So that's one thing that I thought was really exciting.

If you look at the universities at the top of this list, these are schools with a lot of first-generation students, schools with a lot of rural and urban students.

They are very, very different from your Harvards and Swarthmores and what have you in a way that I find very encouraging. Kevin, what about the Ivies, the Ivy League schools?

Should I say, among the so-called super-elite institutions, which schools perform best and why? Because it's not like all those elite institutions got a black mark and were dinged by this study.

So I guess my first question is, which ones that we would think of as the super, quote-unquote, the super elite performed well on these rankings? And were you surprised by that?

Yeah, I mean, if you're doing your job putting together a ranking that is tapping into previously unmeasured parts of the university experience, you hope to be surprised.

And again, I think a lot of people will be surprised, for instance, that Harvard in our ranking ends up below 36 other schools.

And, you know, when we look at the Ives more broadly, I wasn't actually that surprised by what we discovered. My sense was that they have been writing their reputations for quite some time.

And any attempt to sort of measure what's going on at the curricular level, at the level of student experience, would reveal that not that they are bad universities. That's not the lesson here.

It's just that there are many other universities who are performing equally well or better. And so I think when we start looking at these schools, some do a little better.

Princeton, for instance, does a little better on a lot of our free speech metrics than some of the other IVs.

But overall, I think what you start to see from looking at our rankings is that the IVs are not fundamentally better or worse than most other schools.

I think there's this sense for people on the right that, you know, Harvard has nothing to offer. Our rankings don't suggest that at all.

It just suggests that there are plenty of schools that do many things better than Harvard.

We happen to know a lot more about Harvard because it's constantly in the news and that skews perceptions in all sorts of ways.

But what we want to do is by providing some really hard data is to contextualize these schools relative to each other. And again, the IVs are not bad schools as a group.

They're mostly middle-of-the-pack schools. And they do well on some things and very poorly on others.

And if I could just add one other thing that was surprising about all of this is when I started this rankings project, my assumption was that there would be a lot of schools that would be nearly perfect, that would be five stars when we set up the standards.

or the requirements for what would constitute a great education. I didn't think these were beyond reach for most universities, right?

Limited DEI, a commitment to meritocracy, things like curricular rigor, protections for free speech and free expression on campus, ideological viewpoint diversity.

This didn't seem like an impossible set of goals for a university to reach. When we actually finished compiling all these numbers and scoring each school out of 100, what was shocking is that

the highest performers in our group, University of Florida, UT Austin, they're basically at 70 out of 100.

We assigned stars for these overall scores, but what we found is that even the best universities in our group, even the universities that had boldly embraced reform, that do a lot to protect free speech, that show sort of commitment to meritocracy in a lot of ways, there is a lot of work to be done for universities.

So what is striking to me is even for these 100 schools, the sort of 100 most high-profile universities in the country, there is so much that can be done to improve the education they are providing to their students.

So what jumps out at me is there are some schools that are doing well, some are doing poorly. The IVs are not unique really in any particular way.

But there is a ton of work for university presidents to begin pursuing. And hopefully our ranking provides a kind of roadmap or a blueprint for that work.

Raihan, you know, we're having this conversation, you know, the three of us and many others, I think, are all about rescuing higher education from some of what you all have diagnosed in this conversation as a major long-standing problem.

But there's this whole other thing going on that we're not talking about, which is the AI revolution and the fear that AI will wind up performing at some point many of the cognitive tasks that we expect colleges to help students develop, train for, deepen.

Are we just like sort of whistling past the graveyard here? We're having this like debate about, you know, it's not, we need ideological diversity. We need, we need more emphasis on learning U.S.

history and Western civilization and civics and self-governance.

And it's like, guys, there's this whole other thing going on that is going to eclipse the relevance of these institutions that you're trying to save. I see it in almost exactly the opposite way, Dan.

You know, I'm pretty bullish on AI and the good that it can do and how much it can enhance our productivity and what have you. But also, you know, I was thinking about this with my own kids.

You know, my kids are quite little. I was talking to my wife about this.
And just, you know, the main thing you want instill is resilience and love of learning.

Because when you think about, you know, what are things that machines can do?

Like, you know, when you think about, you know, Dan, when you were starting out, and when you were getting your MBA, when you were thinking about the kind of things you were kind of grinding out, the things that were expected of, you know, kind of a young professional, you know, a generation or two ago, there are going to be certain rote things that machines are going to be able to do better than even the sharpest person with the strongest quantitative skills.

What a machine won't be able to do is act with curiosity, build relationships, learn how to deal with other people, learn how to be in an environment where your ideas are going to be tested and sharpened.

And I think those are the things when we're looking at the schools that wind up at the top of this ranking, those are places that, again, are not perfect, right?

And, you know, there's a lot more to do.

But what are the places that are actually cultivating citizenship and a capacity for resilience, a capacity to deal with people with whom you disagree, where you're getting that kind of meaningful exposure, as well as real practical skills.

I've got to tell you, if you're going to Princeton and your roommates all went to Hotchkiss with you or whatever else, or if they're all in the kind of DEI club and they're all in the encampment, you know, because they've never actually met anyone from Israel, they've never actually been exposed to what are the real grounds of those debates, you know, those people are going to be really angry and frustrated when they find that what's going to be needed is tenacity.

and creativity and actually dealing with people who are really, really different.

So, you know, that's the kind of thing that we think higher education, it's actually going to be more imperative rather than less because the whole game has been, oh, I've got to get into the right preschool so I can get into the right K-12 school so I can get into the right feeder to go to a fancy school, X, Y, Z, so I can get an eye banking job.

Guess what? Those iBanking jobs might not be there in the same way, okay? It actually might not matter quite as much to get into a, you know, top. 10 law school.

What really is going to matter is your problem solving ability and actually your ability to deal deal with people who are different and actually kind of meet people's needs and grow internally.

So I think that that's a big part of why, you know, we care about the ideological diversity piece, of course, but it's about what that represents, about how you're kind of getting educated and what you're going to be up for, what kind of challenges you're going to be up for.

We want young people to be educated for resilience. Wow.
I couldn't, that's like the best case for any kind of education, whether it's a U.S.

college education or I think you mentioned Israel, young Israelis joining the Israeli army or young Americans joining the U.S. military, one of the military academies.

I mean, I just think it's love of learning, curiosity, and resilience. If you can arm and wire young people with that, that's probably a better predictor of success.

And Dan, by the way, just one quick thing.

This is outside of the scope of the rankings, but I will say, you know, one thing I found, and I'll bet Kevin agrees with me, one thing you'll see again and again when it comes to young people who thrive in higher education, It's not uncommon for these to be people who came to college after taking a year out or people who went to college and then maybe left for a time to work, to do something where they're tested.

If you want to see some really bright, capable people, try to meet young college students who've worked a service job before they actually wound up getting on campus.

And I know Kevin has a lot of students like that. I started working when I was a teenager.
This is something that is rarer. now and I think that's something that is really really valuable.

So I would say Kevin, maybe for the next edition, you know, let's put some value on some work experience, right? You Some kind of earning while you're learning. Yeah, not for nothing.

We do have the size of the campus ROTC as one of the variables in our rankings. It's not a huge influence, but it's there for exactly this reason.
And I will point out that

we tend to think about the value propositions of universities focused mostly on their credentialing or skills-based functions and sort of what are students going to do.

But a lot of students attend universities for the networking benefits. And this is something that AI can't really replace in any meaningful sense.

So, as we think again about ranking schools and providing perhaps information that is missing from previous ways of thinking about colleges and universities, we did want to highlight that if you go to a school like this, you're going to encounter a very exciting social and political and cultural scene.

We wanted that to be part of our rankings precisely because there are some aspects of the college experience, again, that are, I think, threatened in important ways by AI.

You know, you see that in the classroom today, but there are others things, again, that universities can do to encourage interpersonal connection, relationships with other people, again, how to interact with and also enjoy and learn from

people who maybe come from diverse backgrounds than you. A lot of the schools that we look at, again, they're serving national and international populations.

The only time many of the students who attend these schools are going to have the opportunity to interact with this large and diverse group of people is during college.

And so our rankings attempt to highlight highlight that for students. If they want to focus solely on that dimension, our rankings, again, as a website feature, allow them to do that.

And so I would just point out there are some parts, I think, of the university experience that are going to change as a consequence of AI, but there are other things, again, that only universities can provide.

I actually think, Kevin, that, and this is probably a conversation for another entire episode, but in an age of AI, teaching young people how to read, how to read critically,

how to develop arguments, how to wrestle with other people's arguments.

I cannot tell you how many people I know at senior levels of major, major tech companies, including the beautiful seven or whatever they call the biggest drivers of the public markets these days, will say that at the end of the day, the most successful people in those companies, sure, they have rock star engineers and very technical brains, but if you can't get into a conference room with senior executives, and explain what you're doing, make your argument, advance whatever you're trying to advance through either the written word or debate or back and forth in real time you know it's going to be hard to really ascend and so it's almost even more important now yes yes it's thinking about what is getting commoditized you know if intelligence actually because intelligence narrowly understood becomes a commodity if it you know kind of explodes in value what are the things that become rare and then it becomes judgment it becomes that ability to problem solve in a kind of persistent stick-to-itiveness you know these are just really kind of basic things.

And look, you know, by the time you're getting to college, you know, those are a lot of things that are kind of formed earlier in life.

And, you know, these are things that at college rankings like ours, you know, that's not necessarily going to always be able to get at in the most direct, subtle way.

My concern is that you have a huge number of young people right now who are under-socialized and they don't have a ton of literacy.

You know, the reason why I think, you know, Kevin and I are really passionate about the idea of civics education is that young people are coming to college without that grounding.

I talked to this incredible group of people, this group of 18 and 19 year olds working at a great American tech company on a gap year program. It was really impressive.

I was really struck by how curious they were, how energetic they were, but I was also struck by how little they learned about civics. And these are incredibly, unusually bright people.

And that's a big, big gap. And we're paying for it right now.

When you think about a lot of what's going on in our discourse and online discourse, you're seeing a generation of people who are incredibly susceptible because they haven't gotten that grounding.

And I think that, you know, that's one reason why these civic centers are so valuable because they're not just doing something on campus.

Ideally, they're doing something to help reset, reframe, refresh how civics are taught at K-12 as well. Okay, just before we wrap, a question for each of you just quickly.

Do you think we're really experiencing some kind of revolution in higher education? Or will we look back at this period as just a blip and there will be some return to what was?

That actually, you know, the earth wasn't really shifting beneath our feet in higher education. There was a lot of histrionics.
There was a lot of elites debating about what's happening.

But at the end of the day, nothing really changed.

I mean, I'm curious about Kevin's thoughts on this, but my reaction is absolutely. there's going to be dramatic change.
There's going to be dramatic change for a variety of reasons.

One reason is the larger fiscal picture. You are not going to be writing blank checks to institutions of higher education that have lost legitimacy in the eyes of Americans.

Not just Americans on the right. Dan, you and I know that Americans on the right have been skeptical about higher education for, you know, for 40, 50 years, right?

It's actually the collapse in trust in higher education that you've seen among independents, among people who identify as Democrats. That is a huge challenge.

And the other thing is that the peak 17-year-old cohort has now passed. Every cohort is now getting smaller when you look at those folks who are going into higher education.
I hope that changes.

I hope that we see a rebound in fertility. But if we see that, it's going to take decades for that to actually play out in terms of how it's buoying higher education.

So right now you're going to see intense competition. You're going to see institutions that are many of them, you know, that restorated American institutions.

I would guess in 15, 20 years, some of those institutions are going to be fighting to survive for relevance.

So I think that this is a huge demographic, economic factors are making it much, much tougher.

And that's the reason why our rankings, you know, know, Kevin and I have been hearing from a range of different people, from a range of different university leaders who understand that that legitimacy crisis is going to be life or death for them.

So this is not a flash of the pen. What we saw in the encampments, what we saw post-10.7,

that was a harbinger of this real crisis about the purpose of these institutions, the legitimacy, and how they're going to reset in order to win back the faith and trust of families.

who are thinking, is this actually even worth it? Do I even want to touch these places with a 10-meter cattle prod? Or do I want to do something radically different? Kevin, last word.

Yeah, I would agree with all of that. Look, we have this crisis of confidence in higher education.

It's been sort of, as Ryan pointed out, it's not unique to those on the right, but what is unique is the extent to which it's spread across the society and to the extent to which it's really infected young people.

You can look at surveys of high school seniors and some great data on this, but basically trust and confidence in higher education has collapsed amongst high school seniors, including their desire to even attend college.

So, we have this massive shift in preferences that's coinciding with this huge demographic cliff that we're about to fall off.

We're not going to have the enrollment in higher education that we've had previously. You couple that again with sort of changing preferences for international students.

And suddenly, there's going to be a lot of universities who find it impossible to maintain their fiscal solvency.

So, I think we're going to see a major shakeup at the level of how many colleges and universities are able to still keep the doors open. You're envisioning a whole era now.

We could be entering an era where we're just going to see story after story after story of universities just shutting down or merging with other universities. I wouldn't be surprised.

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised again for the reasons that I described. And I think that will...

perhaps put very productive pressure on those who remain to better serve their students, to make sure that the education that they're offering is relevant, that it's attractive, that they're not willfully alienating something like 70% of their prospective students by, you know, indulging in what is basically activism in the place of education.

And so I think we could be sort of entering this period where we're going to see fewer universities. But for those that remain, we're going to see probably, I think, some pretty serious reforms.

It doesn't mean that every university will adapt. There will still be a place for really bizarre, niche, progressive, liberal arts colleges tucked away in the hills somewhere.

There will always be an audience for those kinds of places.

But I think when we look broadly at the landscape of higher education, we're going to see a sort of narrowing of the landscape as well as some pretty significant reform for those at the top who want to stay.

Yeah, they want to stay economically and socially relevant. All right, Kevin and Raihan, thank you for doing this and really applaud you and your colleagues' work on these rankings.

It is a breath of fresh air.

I found it like it asked questions and identified categories that, in a sense, should be so blindingly obvious for what we should be considering when we think about the role of the university and the experience we want our kids to have at these universities and the role that universities have in society and in Western society, and yet they haven't been.

And these rankings, I think, put a spotlight on that and get us thinking in ways that are a little more creative than we have been led to think and evaluate these institutions over the last number of decades.

So I really, I applaud what you're doing, and I look forward to seeing this rankings grow and expand and flourish. Thanks very much, Dan.
We really appreciate your having us. Thank you.
Thank you.

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