Our friends over at the Stanford Review have a post on The Daily Beast’s college rankings, which recently ranked Stanford as the #7 happiest college in America. No big deal there, but a couple of months before they also deemed Stanford as the #1 most stressful college in America! I’ve already poked fun at their most recent edition of college rankings, but let’s if we can find the same kind of inconsistencies about Cornell in the cross-sectional data:
100 Happiest Colleges
Cornell Ranking: #60
Notable Over/Under Rankings: MIT ranks 49 spots ahead at #11.
50 Most Stressful Colleges
Cornell Ranking: #17
Notable Over/Under Rankings: Harvard (5) and Dartmouth (14) are more stressful than Cornell!? Also, how does Cornell rank #44 in the crime category while NYU is #39?
Best Cities for College Grads
Cornell Ranking: #1
Notable Over/Under Rankings: Nobody’s better than us in this category. But seriously, New York (9), Washington (7), and Los Angeles (21)?
Top 29 Schools Producing Tech Leaders
Cornell Ranking: #11
Notable Over/Under Rankings: Dartmouth is really #1?
So there aren’t any glaring incongruences when it comes to Cornell, but it is a bit odd that Ithaca is the #1 place to live for recent graduates while Cornell ranks #60 on the list of happiest colleges. But a quick scan through the other rankings reveals larger oddities. Harvard ranks #5 in terms of stress but is the #2 happiest college in the country. Caltech is #9 most stressful and #8 happiest. Strange stuff.
These rankings / analyses have become entirely obsolete. They make absolutely no sense. I can think of 59 happier schools than Cornell, sure, but MIT? The observation you made about the ‘stressful’ schools and their place in other categories is very revealing – how did daily beast not think to double-check themselves? Saying Harvard is more stressful than Cornell is beyond ridiculous – it is actually insulting. I dare a Harvard student to try and fail out!
Dartmouth as the number one school for producing tech leaders??? With Lehigh and Northwestern trailing close behind at #7, 8?? I need to see the numbers on this one; the only apparent data they used was ‘notable alumni’ and a brief description of some aspect of the science department, called a ‘tech feature.’ Lehigh (#8)’s feature: “The Launch-IT Program encourages Lehigh Valley 6th to 12th graders toward careers in information technology. ” Cornell’s feature: how about, among many others, having two of the most powerful electron scanning microscopes in the NATION. Cornell’s engineering program (according to US News, the only somewhat reliable listing at this point) ranks far and high above Dartmouth, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Northwestern, and Lehigh, so is this in line with the technology program?
As I’ve said before, it seems many of these new rankings are the product of viral political correctness that can be pretty clearly seen in the methods each source uses to rank its colleges.