November 10, 2026

Photo credit: Eric Raptosh Photography / Tetra images via Getty Images

Last year, a survey found that 70 percent of Americans believe higher education is heading in the “wrong direction,” while another found that just 31 percent believe a college education is “very important.”

It’s easy to see why. City Journal’s 2026 College Rankings evaluated 115 of the country’s most prominent schools, and not one scored above 80 on our 100-point scale. Just seven scored at least 70, while 87 scored below 60.

We used 95 variables to measure education experience, student life, campus governance, and career outcomes. “Combining data from government sources, other ratings systems, and our own original research, our rankings provide a quantitative and holistic assessment of America’s colleges and universities,” Kevin Wallsten writes. “Without access to comparable evidence about the education provided by the country’s most prominent schools, prospective students and their families will too often make application and enrollment decisions based on reputation alone. Our goal is to give them the information they need to judge schools by present performance, not past prestige.”

Read more about the rankings.

Bowling Green Professor Timothy Messer-Kruse recently argued that universities’ civics schools are more about squelching views the state disagrees with than supporting new ideas. Others have criticized these schools as right-wing indoctrination centers.

Not so, Paige Garrett and Derek Lux argue. Just look at some of these schools’ course lists. The University of Texas at Austin’s School of Civic Leadership, for instance, offers a class on presidential leadership drawn from the examples of FDR and Reagan, a class on political economics where students read Adam Smith, Marx, and Engels, and a class on virtue, as understood from Plato to Nietzsche. Meantime, in UT Austin’s conventional government program, a student can finish the government major without having read the Constitution or the Federalist Papers.

“Centers for civic thought and leadership offer their students the opportunity to formulate their own judgments by studying the bedrock texts of political thought,” Garrett and Lux write. “In short, they teach students ‘how to think.’ By contrast, the standard government and political science tracks focus on teaching students ‘what to think.’”

Read more.

Some counties in California conduct “voter outreach” campaigns. In theory, these campaigns are designed to inform “low propensity” voters about the mechanics of voting. In practice, they allow counties to encourage would-be Democratic voters to go to the polls.

Christopher Rufo and Kenneth Schrupp reviewed Riverside and San Diego Counties’ social media spending ahead of Tuesday’s midterms. It turns out that the counties directed ads at users linked to tags like “African American studies,” “Native American studies,” and “Gangsta rap.” In other words, Rufo and Schrupp argue, the counties used proxies for groups that reliably support Democrats, revealing what seems to be a taxpayer-funded “partisan voter mobilization” effort.

Charlie Kirk’s murder devastated the conservative movement. The Right lost not only a highly effective activist and organizer but also one of the few leaders capable of disciplining the movement and taming its excesses. Now, in the wake of Kirk’s death a year ago, Christopher Rufo argues, the Right has been shattered—and it’s paying the price for that disintegration at the ballot box.

Read Rufo’s reflection on Kirk’s death and the midterm wipeout.

This week, lawmakers will begin debating the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA), which would remove barriers to building energy and infrastructure projects. Some lawmakers have raised concerns about how the legislation would affect Native American tribes, but many tribal leaders see the bill as an opportunity to strengthen their sovereignty, Shawn Regan points out. He spoke with Daniel Cardenas, chairman of the National Tribal Energy Association, who said BAAJA would make it easier to develop energy resources.

Indeed, as Regan writes, “many tribes have long struggled with the same regulatory obstacles that frustrate energy and infrastructure projects beyond reservations. Paternalistic federal policies that restrict tribes’ authority over their own resources and development decisions have added to those obstacles.”

Read more about the legislation and what it would mean for tribes.

Over the next decade, the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit Program (FSTC) will create tens of billions of dollars in new scholarships for students. More than 30 states have opted in, and teachers overwhelmingly support the program. Now, it’s time for unions to get on board, Danyela Souza Egorov argues. They’ve been fighting FSTC rather than informing teachers about it and helping them get money to their students.

“Ideally, teachers could be ambassadors for the FSTC,” Egorov writes, “encouraging parents to donate to scholarship-granting organizations (SGOs) that support public school students, in turn helping the kids whom they both care about.”

Read more.

Earlier this year, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s board voted to end its contract with conductor Andris Nelsons, who had served as its music director since 2014. Chad Smith, the BSO’s president and CEO, said Nelsons “was not the right leader for the entirety of our institution and our community.”

Why was Nelsons not the right leader? The board had previously noted its “deep confidence” in his “artistic leadership,” and ticket sales rose during his tenure.

It appears, Heather Mac Donald writes, that Nelsons’s enthusiasm for race- and gender-based programming was inadequate.

“If one wanted to understand the ills plaguing classical music today, the firing of Andris Nelsons is a good place to start,” she argues. “The episode epitomizes the loss of core purpose not just in classical music but in the Western art tradition writ large.”

Read what happened.