U.S. News and World Report has published its annual, highly subjective list of Best Colleges. NYU is listed as #33 in the list of 194 ranked schools, with 69/100 points (c’mon, too easy). So we’re doing pretty good for ourselves! As is expected, the top twenty in the list contains mostly Ivies and big-name universities like Duke and the University of Chicago. Which is cool, I guess, if you want to freeze your butt off for four years or have a killer basketball team in place of moral decency.
The article contains a lot of statistics that most of us promptly stopped caring about once we’d decided where to go to college, but there are some interesting tidbits of information buried in there. Our student-to-faculty ratio is somehow 11:1, despite the evidence that your 500-person Intro to Psychology lecture presents to the contrary; and yes, the gender distribution really IS as imbalanced as you thought it was (40% male : 60% female. Still waiting for an exact quote on the number of LUGs.). The report for some reason also finds it pertinent to mention in its overview that “NYU has a small but active Greek life with more than 25 fraternity and sorority chapters.” At the same time there’s a great pie chart showing the 1% of girls in sororities. If you manage to catch a glimpse of these rare, elusive creatures in the wild, please take a photo and send it to tips@nyulocal.com.A great statistic is that 54% of us have need-based financial aid, which is totally not untenable in any way (our application fee is even $65, for JSex’s sake). Certain student reviews in the report indicate dissatisfaction with the lack of community on campus, to which we respond: join a club! Talk to people! There’s plenty of community here if you know where to find it.
If there are any high school seniors out there reading this, we’d caution you not to take lists like these too seriously. If you go to NYU, you understand your school’s shortcomings, but you also understand that you’d never trade your place at the center of the freaking world for all of the tear-stained rape kits at Duke.
So your logic here is that since Chicago’s winters are colder than New York’s, NYU provides a better education than UChicago? And that since Duke has a good basketball program, it provides an inferior education to NYU’s? Watch what you say — when you make asinine statements like these you discredit your whole column and sound bitter that you don’t attend a top university.
@Jamie: Since when is NYU not a top university in certain arenas, and since when is US News the complete deciding factor in college ranking? It doesn’t take into account the many majors and facets of a university. Yeah, attending NYU for a general history major might not get you a top-ranked spot, but for something like film or the arts, yeah, you are getting top university status.
@Jamie: I think, being that the ranking is subjective, in all fairness, the columnist should be able to make other subjective approaches to ranking NYU. Why not have a ranking of “the colleges with the best winters” or “the colleges with the most saturatingly fanatic basketball fans” ? And posting a comment accusing someone of being bitter is quite harsh… This is, in fact, a student newspaper, not the Wall Street Journal. We are allowed to laugh a bit at the columns, and snicker at other colleges for our own wellbeing. It is called “having a little fun.” I am sure that other colleges do the same to NYU, calling us “overrated” or something like that, just because they failed to make the cut. What’s the big deal? Relax, Jeez.
Since when does having a strong athletic program, with a leading graduation rate amongst its peers, led by a Hall of Fame coach and Olympic champion, been considered a moral deficit? Admittedly I am a Duke graduate, but I fail to recognize the correlation and wonder why a web link to a columnist’s subjective perspective on the Duke-Butler championship game serves as supporting evidence of this claim. Perhaps it is my top 10 education that disables my logic. I guess kids like Nolan Smith, an unassuming student who played in honor of his deceased father, are just indecent humans worthy of scorn. If so, I am happy and privileged to be joining this class of folks on the receiving end of your vitriol.