With every summer comes the king of arbitrary, debatable lists: The Princeton Review’s college rankings.
We missed out on a couple of the most sought-after lists, such as “Lots of Beer” and “Party Schools,” both of which were won through the historic efforts of my degenerate friends at Penn State. Where we did score high, though, was in athletics: According to the rankings, we’ve got the best athletic facilities in the entire country.
I don’t think that’s possibly true. Our facilities are nice, but the best? Oregon is owned by Nike. Florida put up a plaque immortalizing a speech their quarterback made last year. Ohio State doesn’t even have classrooms, they just teach in the gym. Indiana has 3-D helmets students can wear to simulate having chairs thrown at them by former coach Bobby Knight. Texas plays basketball on the moon.
The bigger travesty is our No. 5 ranking for “Students Pack the Stadiums.” I’m all for school pride, but the second worst-kept secret in College Park (first belongs to Madam Flora) is that it would be more accurate to say students pack into the gate, scan their tickets, pack their things and leave. That’s professional wordplay for you and that’s the sad truth. I can only assume that scan-and-leavers contributed to the statistics not only this year, but last year, when we were ranked second in the same category.
The good folks at Princeton Review were not altogether too kind to us this year, despite the fact that they ranked our athletics so high. We got the scarlet letter (number?) of a No. 2 ranking in “Students study the least” for the second year in a row – directly behind some backwoods hick school located in Morgantown, W. Va., that I’ve never heard of.
Second? In the entire country? I wish. This is probably the most arbitrary ranking possible. Go tell the engineering kids that the only people who study less than us are at West Friendly Virginia. It’s all major-specific. If you’re in biochemistry, you will have to study a lot. If you are in regional hotel continental breakfast decision-making, you will probably not study a lot. If you are in journalism, get out.
The point is that this list just serves to upset me, because it devalues the education you’d get at a lot of good schools – Penn State (No. 11 on the list), Texas (15) and University of Ohio (17) among them. I’ve had to study my ass off for three years, and for someone to come in and tell me that we study less than everyone besides West Virginia makes me wish I had paid attention in my English classes so I could articulately describe how angry I am.
Of course, there’s one other ridiculous, insane top-5 list we made: fourth place on the most improbable list of all, directly behind North Carolina (!), Harvard (!!) and Yale (!!!!!!). That’s right, University of Maryland: The Diamondback, the fourth-best college newspaper in the country.
See? I told you this thing is a crock of crap.
Rob Gindes is a senior journalism major. He can be reached at gindesdbk@gmail.com.
