More Garbage, but at Least It's Entertaining

I hate college rankings. They're pretty arbitrary and meaningless, and people put WAY too much emphasis on them. Still, it's like a spectator sport: it's a guilty pleasure to see how your favorite performs each year, blatently ignoring the fact that although rankings change a lot from year to year, the institutions stay basically the same.

My pleasure at the latest edition of the Princeton Review's rankings, comes not so much from the rank, but from it's impact on a long-standing argument I have with Mr. Jonathan N. Kadish. For the last two years, he has aggressively argued that it is simply not possible to receive a good undergraduate education at any institution within a 15 mile radius of living graduate students (I'm guessing that he has no objection to dead ones, although his opinion on this matter is so strong that I wouldn't assume so). A secondary, but still important, criterion of his is that the enrollment of the institution be no larger than his high school (1650 students). By these criteria and his preexisting bias, he also maintained a derisive position on the University of Chicago, as a place where masochistic students go to study, be miserable, study some more, and end it all by committing suicide. With a grad student to undergrad ratio of about 2:1, he consistently reminded me that it might be one of the worst places to attend for the college years.

So surprise, SURPRISE, Mr. Jonathan N. Kadish! The Princeton Review lists the schools with the "Best Overall Academic Experience for Undergraduates" as:

1. University of Chicago
2. Stanford
3. Rice
4. Columbia
5. Reed
...
...
cough... cough...
...
11. Beloved Pomona College

Wahaha!

Ok, so this is all meaningless egotistical posturing, but the point should be made clear enough. Rankings are meaningless, and so are hyper-dogmatic beliefs about colleges and what makes them good or bad. I guess in that respect we're equally hopeless. I'm exaggerating Mr. Kadish and his beliefs a lot here, but I think that it was the one argument on which we could never really agree or agree to disagree. Pomona is a very good and prestigious school and he enjoys it a lot.

Oh, and in case you didn't get the message, UChicago is a fantastic place too!