Do Boricua College, Bluefield State University, Elizabeth City State University, and Mississippi University for Women sound familiar to you?

They are all part of Washington Monthly’s list of the best 25 colleges and universities in 2025.

Over the past two decades, Washington Monthly has published rankings with the intent of avoiding what the most prestigious rankings seek to reward: an institution’s wealth, prestige, and exclusivity. This tendency causes most lists to include the same top 10 or 20 elite universities, most of which are private.

For example, when the U.S. News & World Report published its 2026 college rankings last month, the results were predictable. Ivy League schools such as Princeton and Harvard remained in their top five, with administrators obsessively following and simultaneously derided the rankings.

This year, Washington Monthly integrated four-year colleges and universities — public and private, large and small — into a linear roster of more than 1,400 institutions. The publication also reworked its methodology to focus on the current needs of the American public. Not surprisingly, that includes schools which best assist students of modest economic means to obtain degrees without suffocating amounts of debt.

Since the 1990s, the college admissions game has morphed into an emotional and financial battle where parents and students are encouraged to engage in wanton acts of aggression in an effort to secure a spot at the nation’s most prestigious institutions.. Among the wealthy in particular, the obsession with college admissions has often been frenzied. Recall the 2019 varsity blues college admissions scandal that exposed the numerous prominent CEOs, celebrities, and athletes who were willing to break the law to ensure that their children secured admission to the nation’s elite schools.

As a graduate student in my mid-twenties, I worked in an admissions office at a land grant institution. Although I was not an actual admissions officer, my work afforded me the opportunity to hear stories from such officers. They described what stood out about applicants that led to their unpredictable admissions decisions. One student who gained admission was a first-rate violinist, another grew up on a pig farm in Kansas, and a third was an outstanding poet who happened to be disabled. Hearing such stories was a revelatory experience.

Washington Monthly, in compiling its data for the list, similarly considered a variety of factors that make an institution socially, academically, environmentally, and financially feasible for both students and parents.

The list comes at a time when the Trump administration has targeted elite higher education institutions by threatening to withhold funding and issuing other ultimatums. The issue of campus speech has become a political football that many right-wing politicians are kicking around to pursue their own agendas. The assumption that academia is far more liberal than society overall is dubious. While some educational departments may lean in a leftward directions, donors, alumni, boards of trustees, and the majority of stakeholders tend to be conservative.

Even in this depressingly adversarial political climate, we must congratulate those young people who manage to achieve their dream of going to college. We can only hope their four years will be happy and productive. As for those who are not as fortunate, it is not the end of the world. Their parents need to step in and suggest vocational education, apprenticeships, and internships as just a few of the alternative paths that they can pursue.

In his national bestseller “Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be,” New York Times columnist and Duke University journalism professor Frank Bruni made a convincing case that too many people frequently overemphasize prestige when choosing a college, as if it is the only vital factor. Even though it was published almost a decade ago, Bruni’s book remains relevant today. Not everyone is cut out for the traditional college journey.

Adults are already aware of the hard reality that life doesn’t always turn out the way one expects it to. You may not get that coveted job or promotion. You may lose a dear friend or parent to an untimely death. You may endure a bitter divorce. You may become afflicted with a life-altering disease. These are the sort of experiences that can make rejection from one’s first-choice school seem trivial.

The vast majority of young people will likely get past their initial disappointment and, by fall, be happily settled into campus life at whichever school they attend. For parents of children facing the predicament of not being selected by their preferred college, my sagacious advice would be that life will go on.

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Copyright 2025 Elwood Watson, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate

Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. He is also an author and public speaker.