Hey prospective college students! Are you struggling to decide which college is the right one for you? Well have no fear, because USA Today has come to your rescue with their brief write-up of some researcher’s rankings of the nation’s best college towns.

The college town is one of the most important factors for prospective students in making their college decision. After all, in a typical freshman’s week of studying, crying, and having sex (not necessarily in that order), he or she has a massive two hours of free time to spend in the town. And when that student is in said town, it must contain the resources necessary to allow the student to fulfill his or her important tasks of running to Wegmans and buying pot (not necessarily in that order). Determining suitable college towns is not something to be taken lightly. That is why dozens of researchers and statisticians spent months laboring to identify the towns with the most optimal sketchy bar-to-student ratios.

And in the end, Ithaca came out on top! This is truly a great day for Cornell (and to a lesser and more communications-based extent, Ithaca College). Take that Columbia and Harvard! Ithaca truly is gorges, just like your mom.

Oh, and about those quotation marks in the title. First, Ithaca technically was the best college town in America. This article was written back in the beginning of September–well before the great Pig Microbe Armageddon of 2009. We didn’t know about this article until now because, well, it was in USA Today and we haven’t stayed in any hotels in the past month.

Secondly, a “college town” is defined in this instance as a metropolitan area with a population of under 250,000 people. There were four categories in total, with the other four consisting of metropolitan areas with over 250,000 people, over 1 million people, and over 2.5 million people. In that last category, New York was number 1 and Boston was number 3. So Columbia and Harvard may not necessarily agree to “taking that”.

Finally, the towns Ithaca beat in its category include State College, Ames, and Iowa City. This competitive situation is known in economic game theory as the “guy with one leg versus the three guys with no legs in the Tour de France” condition.

Okay, so maybe its not so great a ranking for Ithaca. Cornell recognizes this, as they didn’t even mention the article on their website. Though that may be due to this ranking’s lack of wizarding movie tie-ins.

College rankings are generally quite zany, but this year’s lists have taken ridiculousness to a new level. We’ve seen the Princeton Review name Columbia as topping the list of the best college towns–with Barnard coming in third despite being located three yards away. We’ve seen Forbes rank Cornell as the 207th best university in America thanks to a formula that assigns a 25% weight to RateMyProfessors.com. We’ve even seen GQ magazine redefine the Jeremy Piven Hierarchy of Assholery™ by sticking Brown at the top of their “Douchiest Colleges” list.

It’s all made for great amusement (and page views, cha-ching!). However, we here at IvyGate feel we can do one better in terms of ludicrousness, while at the same time create a college ranking equally as reasonable as anything U.S. News can produce. (Ivy League schools only, of course.)

Like Forbes, we’re also going to utilize a website in our ranking methodology. However, we’re going to show up those flat-tax pussies by giving our chosen website 100% of the weight. Also, the website we’ve chosen is one that, like RateMyProfessors, is very popular with college students. The difference between IvyGate’s data source and Forbes’ is that ours is a trusted source of factual information and it is a better teacher than any professor in history–because no professor has encyclopedic knowledge of British monarchs, the periodic table, and Seth Rogen movies. Our chosen source of college ranking data is Sporcle. Read the rest of this entry »

HYP: Time to celebrate. Everyone else: Get ready to be pissed off.

Justin Pope over at the Associated Press scooped the US News & World Report college rankings by 6 and a half hours. While we vivisected some of the rankings from the the Princeton Review’s “Best 371 Colleges” and Forbes, no one cares about those lists.

Onward past the jump to the rankings that really matter, which we arrange into a handy, numbered list, because for some reason Pope didn’t do that. Read the rest of this entry »

Well we’ve come to that point in the summer where its time for the temporary IvyGate editors (Max and Michael, not that it matters) to say goodbye. It hasn’t been a great season for the Ivy League though. Cornell lost everyone’s social security numbers. Harvard is broke and is trying to own English. A Brown student and a Yale student competed to see who could be more annoying. Californians don’t understand us. Don’t even mention lacrosse. And we seem to be forgetting something. What could it be? Oh well, it probably wasn’t important.

But the worst news of all came just this week. Forbes Magazine, the nation’s premier experts on all things list-related, released their ranking of America’s Best Colleges. Here are the sobering results:

1. Army

2. Princeton

3. Caltech

4. Williams

5. Harvard

6. Wellesley

7. Air Force

8. Amherst

9. Yale

10. Stanford

11. MIT

12. Swarthmore

13. Columbia

14. Centre

15. Haverford

…

…

…

Umm, it’ll be a while until we reach the next Ivy League school, so we’ll warp ahead after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

The Princeton Review released its 2010 guide to the Best 371 Colleges last week. Along with overviews for every one of those arbitrary number of schools, the Princeton Review also released their college ranking lists in various categories. The lists are determined by surveys taken by current students at every school, and the categories run the gamut from schools with the most accessible professors to schools with the most stoned professors.

To see these lists, you could buy the Princeton Review book for $25. If you’re smart, you could just go to the Princeton Review website to see them. But if you’re lazy and can put up with not-great formatting, we’ve got all 62 of the rankings right here. Every single one, including those without any Ivy League schools on it. And because we felt like it, four of us have added our own commentary to the lists below.

In reading through the lists, we point out the good (Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia have the top three best libraries), the bad (No Ivy League schools classified as “Dodgeball Targets”), and the absolutely ridiculous (It appears Yale had only one student fill out a survey and it happened to be on opposite day). But mostly, our group of one Harvard grad (Adam), one Cornell grad (Max), and two Princeton grads (Maureen and Michael) just riff on everything. We’re just like the Satellite of Love Crew. Heck, one of us is even named Mike! So please join us, will you, as we blow up the Hitler building. There may even be railing kills. All the lists are after the jump, including an Ivy League school summary at the very end. Read the rest of this entry »

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently released its annual survey of college presidential pay, and – surprise, surprise – in 2006-7, Ivy League presidents ranked among the nation’s top earners. Of the Ancient Eight, Columbia’s Lee Bollinger topped the list, receiving a whopping $1,411,894 in pay and benefits, followed by Amy Gutmann (Penn) with $1,088,786; Richard Levin (Yale) with $955,407; Ruth Simmons (Brown) with $775,718; Shirley Tilghman (Princeton) with $742,444; David Skorton (Cornell) with $730,604; and James Wright (Dartmouth) with $569,761. (Derek Bok, who was the interim president at Harvard that year, earned $0.)

Nevertheless, only Bollinger and Gutmann cracked the private school top ten, coming in at fourth and eighth places respectively. (For whatever reason, the Chronicle places private and public school executives in distinct categories; combine the lists together and Bollinger falls to fifth, and Gutmann, to tenth.)

If the highest salaries and benefits aren’t going to Ivy presidents, then to whom do they go? Find out (the rather surprising results) after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

U.S. News & World Report wrote about yet another ranking system on its blog, The Paper Trail. Unlike other rankings, the Global Language Monitor’s iteration eschews an arcane formula in favor of a more direct approach; it merely tallies up the the number of mentions a particular college or university gets in print and online, and orders schools accordingly.

Half of the top ten schools in the university category are from the Ivy League. As you’d expect, Harvard comes out on top. Columbia takes a surprising second, while Yale (8), Princeton (9), and Cornell (10), sit at the bottom of the top. The Ivies that no one’s ever heard of fare worse: Penn is 11th, Brown is 30th, and Dartmouth – surprise, surprise – is unlisted.

Obviously, the rankings are biased toward large research universities, which explains why undergrad-focused schools like Brown and Dartmouth would do poorly. But then again this version is only measuring quantity and not quality – it doesn’t profess to do anything else. It’s refreshingly direct in its methodology, so, at least in our minds, it’s a welcome addition to the dubious world of college rankings.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been sitting around wondering, “When will Harvard get the recognition it deserves?” The wait is over, my friend. In US News and World Report’s 2009 “National University Rankings,” Harvard surpassed Princeton for the top spot, ending 8 straight years of New Jersey rule. This comes on the heels of Princeton’s first-place finish in the flawed but entertaining Forbes.com best college list.

Harvard, incidentally, was just ranked “Most Overrated” in Radar Magazine’s guide to America’s worst colleges. The guide cites Harvard’s 25% virgin rate. But would you really want to have sex with that twenty-five percent? In other news, Cornell is listed as the runner-up to “Most Overrated.” When you think about it, it’s kind of a compliment. That is, until you read on and get to the part about Cornell’s status anxiety and Ithaca’s geographical advantages. To wit: “Thankfully, rocky gorges surrounding the campus continue to provide the sweet release of death for those Cornellians who just can’t take it anymore.”

But enough about suicide: following her venerable leader, Columbia advanced in the US News rankings. Yale and Dartmouth stayed the same. UPenn, Brown and Cornell all lost ground. The Liberal Arts Colleges are still unimportant.

Here’s how the Ivies fared:

1. Harvard (ranked 2nd in 2008)

2. Princeton (ranked 1st in 2008)

3. Yale (ranked 3rd in 2008)

6. Penn (ranked 5th in 2008)

8. Columbia (ranked 9th in 2008)

11. Dartmouth (ranked 11th in 2008)

14. Cornell (ranked 12th in 2008)

16. Brown (ranked 14th in 2008)

After the jump, Harvard tells you she’s embarrassed by all the attention.

Read the rest of this entry »