No Jewish college or university made the top 100 in a new ranking from City Journal, a Manhattan Institute magazine, which it calls the “first genuinely holistic evaluation of America’s most prominent schools.” But Yeshiva University made a list of “other notable schools,” alongside Catholic University of America, Hillsdale College, St. John’s College and University of Austin.
Yeshiva University is tied for No. 84 in that other college ranking—that of U.S. News & World Report—but there was limited data available on the Modern Orthodox school, according to Kevin Wallsten, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute who works on the new ranking.
“Yeshiva demonstrates a laudable commitment to familiarizing its students with the Western canon and, unlike many other schools, has avoided implementing an expansive diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy,” Wallsten told JNS.
Wallsten said that Touro University didn’t have enough data to assess, and Brandeis University, which has “Jewish roots,” received one star out of five.
Brandeis “has a great deal to improve upon” and did not perform well on the think tank’s “price-to-earnings premium” statistic, according to Wallsten. The statistic suggest that it would take students 3.6 years to earn back their investments in their education at Brandeis.
Touro received a 7.03 on that score, meaning that it would take a Touro student seven years to pay back educational costs, according to Wallsten.
The rankings, a joint project with the National Association of Scholars, assessed leadership quality, educational experience, student experience and career outcomes, using 68 factors. The list suggests a sharp contrast between reputation and rankings at elite universities, such as Harvard University, which was cited for weak free-speech protections and ideological imbalance.
University of Florida ranked first for dismantling its diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, posted on social media about the ranking. “University of Florida ranked No. 1 college in America. Florida State ranked No. 7,” he stated. “The Manhattan Institute’s City Journal has devised a new methodology to rank colleges.”
“This includes giving credit to colleges that perform well on issues—free speech, ideological pluralism, promotion of merit, quality teaching and resistance to ideological fads—on which so many colleges have performed poorly In recent years,” DeSantis wrote.
City Journal aims to give students and parents a “radically different way of thinking about which school to attend.”
In that radical view, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (13), University of Pennsylvania (17), Stanford University (18), Princeton University (24), Yale University (30), University of Chicago (32), Columbia University (34) and Harvard University (37) all rank below University of Texas at Austin (2), University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (3), Texas A&M (4) and University of Notre Dame (5).
