Washington Post highlights UC Santa Cruz as an 'up-and-comer'

The Washington Post highlights UC Santa Cruz as one of five universities that "really are up-and-comers."

Higher education reporter Daniel de Vise, writing in his "College Inc." online blog, writes that UCSC has "evolved into a Research 1 university over the past 20 years" and is "now categorized as a 'very high research activity' school," the highest ranking by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He notes that U.S. News & World Report ranks UCSC 72nd among national universities with elite admission stats.

The context for the online article is a look behind the U.S. News rankings and a feature de Vise wrote a day earlier on the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, another "up-and-comer.'' He says these universities are "part of higher education’s younger generation … a cohort of universities that came into their own in the second half of the 20th century."

He goes on to list four others, including UCSC, as  "a sort of new breed: young, fast-growing schools that are swiftly ascending into the top rank."  Faculty as these schools have "benefitted from a rare opportunity to build a university in the modern era, with modern priorities and contemporary sensibilities." 

De Vise also highlights Binghamton University, George Mason University, and University of South Florida University as other up-and-comers. 

De Vise notes that UCSC beat out U.C. Berkeley and Stanford to house the Grateful Dead archives and poses the rhetorical question: "What other campus could have spawned the band Camper Van Beethoven?"