Hello and welcome to another episode of the City Journal podcast.

My name is Rafael Menguall, and I'm so happy to be your host today.

I am joined by my two brilliant colleagues.

We have Neitou Arnold and Rainier Murekage.

Welcome to the show, ladies.

Hi. Hope you're doing well. I'm doing wonderfully, wonderfully. So excited that you guys are joining us

because for those of you who are watching and don't know, Nitu and Rainu do amazing work on

higher education specifically. And I wanted to bring you guys on today because

I really wanted to talk about the fact that City Journal did something kind of crazy.

We released our own college rankings. So we're now competing with US News and World Reports

and Princeton Review and all of these other great institutions.

And you guys were very intimately involved in that project. And so I wanted to bring you on just to talk a little bit about those rankings, why we did them in the broader state of higher education today.

So why don't you need to start just by telling us a little bit about the rankings themselves, what makes them notable?

What makes them different from some of the stuff that's already out there?

I mean, I think it's great that City Journal released its own rankings because, you know, we've seen time and time again in polls that there's declining trust in higher education,

and those concerns often fall along two lines, costs and classroom content.

Traditional college rankings are able to capture the costs, but they're not measuring

whether students are getting a good education.

And that's where the City Journal College rankings is filling that gap.

We're looking at issues like the free speech environment, curricular rigor, meritocracy on campus.

And I think all those variables are important to give us a

fuller picture. Yeah. I mean, Rainu, when I was sort of reading the release of the City

...