It’s that time of year, weirdos who drool over meaningless college rankings! Penn has dropped one spot to number 5 in U.S. News and World Report’s much-awaited Best Colleges 2011. Harvard, Princeton and Yale predictably retained the top triumvirate (in the same respective order as 2010), while Columbia usurped dear ol’ Penn for the number 4 slot we held on to in 2010.
It’s not so lonely at the top: Penn shares the number 5 position with Stanford this year. MIT and Caltech share number 7, while Dartmouth, Duke and UChicago battle it out at number 9.
Although it sucks that Penn dropped a bit this year, it’s worth noting that while last year we shared the spot with CalTech and MIT, this year they’re lower than us. Anyway, blame Columbia, where fun is apparently misunderstood.
The issue hits newsstands Tuesday, should you need to see this in print.
Everyone loves rankings, especially when Penn captures a coveted top spot. And since many of us are currently buried away in the depths of Van Pelt, it comes as little surprise that Penn took home this year’s #4 spot on the Daily Beast’s ranking of the 50 Most Stressful Colleges.
We’d also like to take a moment of silence to note that this is our second fourth place finish of the year—not an easy feat in itself.
The blog (which seems to have a penchant for rankings) took five key factors into their final tally: cost, acceptance rate, competitive academics, engineering rank and crime rank.
While we didn’t take away a top three finish (gold, bronze and silver go to Stanford, Columbia and M.I.T., respectively), we did edge out Harvard and Princeton in a close running. We’d also like to point out that the tipster who alerted us to our prestigious award also initially mistook us for Penn State, who slid in at #46. We’re better than that, really.
So congrats Penn, keep on doing what you do best.
This is IQ from the Burger King Kids Club.
Philadelphia’s IQ is 130. Okay, we know what you must be thinking: “Only 130? Come on now Philly, you should’ve tried harder.” But it actually translates as 11th on the list of America’s smartest cities, according to that bastion of truth, The Daily Beast. Yes, 11th! The Beast drafted the list based on some really complicated things we didn’t understand: something about nonfiction books and per capita bloo blee boo. But even so, 11th place? Hells yeah.
Sadly, topping the list is Raleigh-Durham, a place that no one who’s not from North Carolina has heard of (unless you go to Duke University that is… but then again, what is this, Duke?) With a combined IQ of 170, the folks over there are too far ahead of Philadelphia for us not to be ashamed. But a minor consolation prize, New York is 13th. So suck it, New York. We may not have a giant statue of a near- naked lady and a torch, but we do have a phatter brain. Yes, we said “phatter.”
We were psyched when US News & World Report gave us fourth place in their annual rankings, placing us alongside such famous #4’s as Brett Favre, Georgia, and The Color Purple at the 1985 Box Office. But we wondered, “Did they actually talk to people who go here?” Turns out: yes!
Check out the magazine’s CollegeClickTV for a bunch of interviews they did with students earlier in the year. Important topics discussed include how great our dance teams are, how much walking students have to do, how we treat the French and how we have short people and tall people that can stand next to one another for comedic effect.
The Green.
Rankings, rankings rankings. We’ve been up, we’ve been down…and now we’re sort of in the middle. Fortunately, this ranking has nothing to do with bragging about how smart we are.
Penn ranks #45 in Sierra magazine’s “Cool Schools” 2009 rankings, which evaluate how environmentally friendly a school is.
Frankly, we can’t say we’re shocked we didn’t make the top ten.
Nothing helps us college kids place a value on our education (and selves) more than highly relevant rankings and not at all arbitrary point values assigned by respectable publications. In fact, ever since this one, we’ve been feeling about as special as the 83rd item in any list does.
However, if you’ve experienced any altitude sickness or vertigo today, you can blame it on moving up through the ranks! According to The Daily Princetonian (we all get their breaking news reports e-mailed to us, right?) Penn was ranked No. 4 in the U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Colleges 2010.” This coveted spot beneath Harvard, Princeton, and Yale (ranked No. 1, No. 1, and No. 3 respectively), is one that we have the privilege of sharing with California Institute of Technology, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University.
The issue hits news stands tomorrow, so you better wake up early, run with scissors to your nearest magazine vendor, buy several copies (but not so many that other people won’t get a chance to see how good your school and the three others are), cut out the page on which Penn appears from two of them, tape one to your shirt, and take the other one home, where you should have a picture frame ready and waiting to receive it.
As a blog, we tend to generally ignore rankings, because a) we have no competitors, and b) we’re the best. As a university, however, we used to kind of care. We used to care, that is, until we read Forbes‘ college rankings, which were released this week. Brace yourselves. Penn is ranked #83.
Yes, you heard us right: EIGHTY-THREE. Fortunately, the criteria for the rankings are nonsense, basically, but we’re still slightly shaken by our apparent fall from the top (okay, we were only at #61 on the 2008 list).
Although Penn is seriously slammed in the main list, Forbes also published another list: “The Billionaire Universities,” ranking those schools that have the highest number of billionaire alumni, on which Penn is ranked #3.
We told ya.
Princeton Review has released its annual ranking of the country’s top party schools. And this year, our sort-of-rivals from Penn State top the list. Congrats to the Nittany Lions (and to our friends at Onward State) for this enviable honor. Not shockingly, no Ivies made the list.
Remember that rant we went on the other day about things with the name “Penn”? Yeah, well, we forgot to mention that we find Penn tennis balls irksome too.
Is it because we’re bitter that they’re America’s #1 selling tennis ball and we’re only America’s #6 university? A little.
CollegeOTR tipped us off to Trojan’s sexual health report card, a glorified survey on campus resources masquerading as some sort of racy report rather than what it is, a press release that they hope will get picked up on blogs like this one. Mission accomplished! Penn ranks 21, behind Columbia, Cornell and Brown, but ahead of Harvard and Yale. We’re not sure what the implications of this are–can we expect to get more severe STD’s when we hook up with Yalies? Will this harm Penn’s permanent sexual transcript?
View the full report here.
