I'm happy to see UT Austin at #46 in the National Universities rankings. And Emerson as #16 for Universities-Master's (North).

I note that Uncle Ed's Really Good University of Facts and Shit didn't make the cut

I think it's in the graduate programs.

"Knowledge is good" - Faber College

The Rhode Island School of Design: Go Nads, Go!

I'm quite pleased that my alma mater, Wake Forest University ('03), is ranked at #27, and that stupid old UNC-Chapel Hill has fallen down the list even further.

These ratings are stupid, not written by academics, and not taken seriously by universities except for the effect they have on gullible teenagers and their earnest but uninformed parents. If you insist on such rankings for your kids or yourself, look up a book called the Gourman Report (written by a psychology professor from California based on input from other scholars) -- there's one for undergraduates that ranks schools overall and (more importantly for most students) by major and another book that ranks graduate and professional schools similarly. The now defunct but once excellent Lingua Franca magazine published a few books dishing the dirt on humanities and social science graduate programs from an insider's perspective while I was in college (including job tracking for recently minted PhDs) that were the best of their kind, but that was a few years ago and I don't think they make those anymore. You still might want to get a hold of those if you're considering graduate school at a top program, though, since many of the analysis of department strengths and top scholars in the field is still valid. For people interested in law school, pick up a book called "The Insider's Guide to Law Schools" that has detailed information and student opinion on the top law schools in America. I think the Yale Daily News Insider's Guide linked above on Amazon takes a similar approach, but I haven't read it. I've heard it's good, though. I wouldn't recommend any of the other books listed on Amazon above since they're a waste of your money.

The USNWR rankings aren't particularly useful and they contribute to the increasing tendency of parents and students to look at their college educations as a consumer smorgasbord and take the "marketplace" of ideas concept a little too literally. They might be right on general reputation on some matters -- like Princeton being as good a school as Harvard or Yale being the best law school, etc. -- but they're either wrong or uninformed on many of their rankings. And more importantly, a kid choosing a college shouldn't choose it based on general reputation -- they should have an idea of what they want to study and the relative strength of the schools they're looking at in those departments, particularly if they're looking at graduate study or job placement after college. They should also find out what the atmosphere of the school is like and whether they'd fit into that culture, which one would hope but can't reliably expect that they'd glean from tours and glossy brochures.

That is all.

I heard that 55 schools bribed their way onto the list. Someone should really investigate this fraud of a list :).

But seriously, I think one thing that is flawed in the methodology is that they don't take campus diversity in to account. I know a lot of people will shout me down for this because they think I'm advocating affirmative action (I'm not) but it is important. I went to school in an extremely small town. The kid who finished below me in high school ranking went to Syracuse and I went to Boston. Syracuse is 4 places ahead of BU. There is no way I could have learned anywhere near what I learned in Syracuse, NY versus Boston, Mass.

I think the value of someting like this is as one tool among many, not as a difinitive guide - one good thing about this report is that it has som many dirrerent categories, you can pick and choose what is of importance to you