U.S. News and World Report College Rankings Are Bogus, Important (As Usual)

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. Read more…


NYU’s CAS Economics Department is the 7th Best in the World

picture-121 Harry potter and the sorcerers stone download…at least according to this mysterious ranking computed by RePEc, or Research Papers in Economics. (This is a moment, by the way, where we say that rankings are awesome.)

The rankings from RePEc are apparently based on 31 different criteria, but as the name of the site implies, it seems that they are mostly centered around the quality of research papers written by scholars in the department. As an Economics major myself, I’ve had some incredibly mediocre professors – including the worst teacher I’ve had at NYU – so sadly it’s uncertain whether our better-than-the-neighbors-uptown ranking transfers over to the level of the academic experience for students. At the same time, I have the professor (admittedly creepily) pictured here, so I won’t complain too much.

Then again

Photo by Nicole He