Who’s No. 1? It Depends on Who’s Asking : Colleges: To help pick that perfect school, magazines offer both practical and hedonistic advice on where to go--or not.
Yale University’s No. 3 spot on U.S. News & World Report’s annual college rankings might kindle parents’ dreams of sending their offspring to the prestigious Ivy League institution.
But if their son reads Inside Edge, a magazine for 18- to 24-year-old guys, he’ll know Yale is the pits for parties, babes and sports.
Their feminist daughter, however, may veto Yale for a different reason--Sassy magazine’s warning about its “repulsive list of alums: former President George Bush, Sen. Arlen Specter, Pat Robertson, (Boston University President) John Silber, William F. Buckley Jr., and Clarence Thomas.”
As college application deadlines approach, a host of magazines are offering advice where to go. Or not. Their criteria and conclusions range from practical to political--to simply hedonistic.
The rankings’ methodologies vary as much as the results, from the exhaustive surveys of Money magazine and U.S. News to anecdotal suggestions in Sassy and Seventeen.
Ivy League schools--Harvard, Princeton and Yale--topped the list in U.S. News, which annually lists the best based on surveys of 2,655 college presidents, deans and admissions directors.
Those opinions are combined with statistics measuring student selectivity (based on the percentage of students who were accepted, the percentage who actually enrolled, and their high-school class standings and aptitude test scores), faculty resources (including the student-to-faculty ratio, class size, the percentage of faculty with doctorates, and salary of tenured professors), financial resources, graduation rate and alumni satisfaction.
“The idea is that through statistical and reputational studies you can determine where are the best colleges, who has the best students who has the best resources,” says senior editor Robert Morse.
There are limitations, Morse acknowledges: The top picks apply only “if money is no object and assuming that you met the qualifications to get you into Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Amherst.”
Caltech (fifth) was the top-ranked university in California, one spot above Stanford. UC Berkeley rated 19th and UCLA was 22nd. USC and UC campuses at Riverside, San Diego, Davis, Irvine and Santa Barbara were in the top 51 universities, but without individually numbered rankings. Among liberal arts colleges, Pomona College (5) and Claremont McKenna Colleges (11) were the only California schools in the top 25.
Money magazine’s rankings are focused somewhat differently. Their list rates the best schools by the ratio of cost to quality, and first place this year went to New College at the University of South Florida. Caltech also finished fifth on this list, while Pomona College (23) and Harvey Mudd College (25) were the only other California schools in the top 25.
Combining its own surveys with data from several public and private research organizations, Money measured factors such as selectivity of the student body, resources (including student-faculty ratio, library resources and spending on students), as well as graduation rates and the number of students who go on to graduate or professional school.
Comparing these variables to tuition costs, Money selected schools that offer higher quality education than similar schools in their price range.
“I think it gives families that are price-sensitive a place to start looking for a place they can afford,” says Jersey Gilbert, Money’s statistical editor.
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Inside Edge staffers believe U.S. News and Money have missed something.
“It’s good to find an academically rigorous school, but that doesn’t preclude having a good time,” says Johnathan Hsu, Inside Edge’s editor-in-chief.
“We rank colleges based on their fun quotient or--to put it in a more crude way--how well they party.”
So its list measures nine variables: bar and club scene, party scene, attractiveness of female student body, ease of graduation, ease of classes, college facilities, size of female student body, sports involvement and location.
Editors gathered statistical data from existing college guides and dispatched correspondents for inspections. The results ran under the disclaimer: “We here at Inside Edge don’t really like the idea of going to school. But if we had to, here’s where we’d go . . . “
Florida State came in first, just ahead of UC Santa Barbara. The University of Southern California and UCLA placed 12th and 13th, respectively, of 300 schools.
The University of Alabama, which didn’t make the top 150 in U.S. News, placed seventh with Inside Edge. “With a campus bar strip almost as good as Georgetown’s, U of A is certainly the best place to get some Southern Comfort,” magazine editors reported.
But Sassy magazine claims Alabama’s hard-partying fraternities are a cause for alarm, not praise.
Sassy’s list of the “Ten Unsassiest Colleges in America” excoriated the school for its “terrorist Greek system,” which reportedly controlled student government through mob-like tactics without intervention from school authorities.
Alabama spokeswoman Janet Griffith said Sassy’s report of the fraternity scandal was exaggerated, but she didn’t dispute Inside Edge’s claims about Alabama’s social scene:
“I think the way they put it, I certainly would be in agreement. It was something they did for fun. But at any rate it had nothing to do with the academic side of the institution.”
The California State University system came up short in both Sassy and Emerge magazines for its treatment of athletes. Sassy dissed the system for shortchanging female athletes on funding. And Emerge, which ran a report on the worst colleges for graduating black athletes (based on NCAA statistics), rated California state universities at San Jose, Sacramento, Northridge and Long Beach as first, second, fourth and 12th worst, respectively.
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The contrasts don’t end there. Inside Edge’s bottom 10 included four of U.S. News’ top 15.
Besides Yale, Caltech, Johns Hopkins and University of Chicago were dismissed as dismal dumps where nerds, dweebs and geeks slave over schoolwork, stumble around the football field and spend their weekends playing Parcheesi.
Seventeen’s list based suggestions on advice from high school counselors and considered both scholarship and fun. Four of their top 10 picks--Rice, Georgetown, University of Pennsylvania and Emory--were also among News’ venerable top 25.
Wellesley, ranked fourth among U.S. News’ liberal arts colleges, made Seventeen’s recommended list and has the “Hillary factor” as the First Lady’s alma mater.
Seventeen’s list overlapped somewhat with Inside Edge’s, but for reasons that were more coincidence than common ground. Seventeen recommended Georgetown based on one accomplished alumnus--Bill Clinton. But Inside Edge ranked the school sixth mainly by virtue of the “size of female student body.”
Only one school, Rice University, made it to the top 15 of four separate lists (including No. 2 in Money) without showing up as a villain in Sassy.
But in the end, Alabama’s Griffith said, they’re only lists.
“All of that must be interesting to readers or magazines wouldn’t continue to do it,” she says. “But I don’t think it’s appropriate to make a big deal out of it whether you’re presented in a positive light or a negative light.”
