The Weekly: The Wall Street Journal should rank Hillsdale

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The Weekly: The Wall Street Journal should rank Hillsdale
Hillsdale College’s Central Hall. Nicole Ault | Collegian

Hillsdale jumped another 10 points in U.S. News and World Report’s 2021 ranking of the 100 Best National Liberal Arts Colleges, at 54th in the country, and The Collegian was recently ranked fifth in college newspapers in the country by Princeton Review. 

The Wall Street Journal’s annual ranking of the best colleges in the nation, however, excluded Hillsdale yet again from its list. 

The Journal has ranked nearly 800 colleges across the nation every year for the past 16 years, from Ivy League schools like Harvard and Yale to the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It’s a federalized selection in terms of geography, but in terms of federal funding, the Journal’s ranking system is ironically centralized. 

A handful of Hillsdale alumni work at the Journal, too. Yet because of one determining factor, the Journal’s reliance on data from federal databases that don’t include Hillsdale, the college is excluded from the Journal’s rankings. Because Hillsdale does not accept federal funds, Hillsdale student data is not listed in those databases, which let users compare schools and from where WSJ draws its rankings.

The Wall Street Journal is one of the last remaining mainstream publications that has not become a leftist echo chamber. It is praised by conservatives, centrists, and moderate Democrats for continuing to uphold free-market principles. So why is the most free college in the country excluded from their rankings?

Hillsdale College’s decision to not accept federal funding is exactly the free-market option for education that a publication like the Wall Street Journal should celebrate.