US News and World Report just released their annual college rankings, and Columbia holds strong at number 4 behind HYP.”>

jessica marinaccio & co.

You’re ashamed to admit you care, but it’s okay, we kind of do too. US News and World Report just released their annual college rankings, and Columbia holds strong at number 4 behind HYP.

Overheard reaction from RAs: “One, two, three, DIDN’T DROP!!!!”

Uhhh okay this is really embarrassing. Those were, as many commenters have pointed out, last year’s rankings. We’re a little giddy from all the freshpeople joy and made a innocent mistake. The 2012 rankings are due out soon. Stay tuned.

The 2011 edition of the US News & World Report‘s “Best National Colleges” rankings just came out (like, a femtosecond ago), and our humble little university In The City of New York has jumped to 4th place from 8th place last year, putting us right behind Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. The USNWR rankings are arguably the most widely quoted college rankings out there, and we’re guessing there’s nothing but pure Cristal flowing through Hamilton right now.

Cheers! Now crack open a bottle! Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

However, we should note that other rankings have been slowly been released these past few weeks, and Alma Mater did not fare so well in their eyes. Forbes ranked Columbia 13th, the Academic Ranking of World Universities puts us at 8th internationally, and the hodgepodge of rankings over at The Princeton Review puts Columbia in the top 10 lists only for best library (5th) and best college town (1st).

I guess you can’t win them all. But we’ll have a hearty swig of that Cristal now, please.

Update: So some of the crazies over at College Confidential believe that USNews miscalculated Stanford’s ratings and that it should actually be at #4, leaving us at #5. We don’t speak this language but you can investigate for yourself on this nutso thread.

CCSC and ESC both canceled their weekly meetings because of board retreats, but SGA is still around to keep the student government machine rollimg. Nikhita Mahtani reports.

Monday’s SGA meeting had a special guest, Carol Katzman, the new head of IT at Barnard fondly dubbed “VPK.”  VPK apparently just couldn’t bring herself to leave the ivory tower: she began by joking that she has “been involved with higher education since college!” She continued to ask students’ opinions about so-called ‘hot buttons’, which sparked a discussion about students’ IT problems. Some of the main issues brought up included greater wireless access, wired networks, dining, clubs, and money, with all suggestions passed along President Debora Spar.

SGA is also to meet with Barnard’s Board of Trustees next Wednesday.  The meeting will now only be between the students and the board, without any administrators attending, to facilitate more in-depth discussion. Plans have been made to discuss Barnard’s new college ranking policies. Barnard was ranked 30th under liberal arts colleges by U.S. News last year, before which it hadn’t been ranked. This causes concern for many students, some for whom the ranking would have influenced their decision to come to Barnard.  U.S. News also inadvertently entered into the fray of the eternal (well, at least twenty-six-year-old) Columbia-Barnard debate, not noting Barnard’s relationship to Columbia in the rankings.  Some expressed concern that Barnard is little known as an independent institution, but the U.S. News still ranks it as one. Read more…

Two years ago, we at Bwog lost the U.S. News and World Report‘s “Paper Trail” blog’s Best [Campus] Alternative Media Outlet poll to Wesleyan after some crotchety commenters lampooned their granola-eating ways and they retaliated en masse. We lost last year, too.

This year, we have another foe: Yale. That’s right, now you have the chance to reject them.

What makes this battle even more worth fighting is that the Yale blog is based out of one single residential college. That’s like a blog for Wien (albeit a beautiful, wonderful Wien with its own library and cafeteria) winning this whole contest. Egregious. And while we lower our lances at Yale, we also set our sights at Penn State. You may have an undergrad population of six million, but we have the fervor to best you.

Vote now, vote on multiple computers, whatever it takes. You have until midnight on February 17th. Do it for Bwog, because we’d do it for you.

Tomorrow, US News & World Report will release the most important list of our time or any other: its annual ranking of the best colleges and universities.

Bwog received an exciting advance press release, the only information on which was that this year Columbia, Duke, and the University of Chicago share the 8th place spot for top universities. (UChicago and Columbia were tied for the #9 spot last year, while Duke ranked 8th.)

We look forward to seeing the rest of the list in all its schadenfreude-y glory tomorrow, and will update with the rest of the rankings as soon as we receive them.

UPDATE 11:51 AM: Full list — well, full list of the portion you’re interested in — after the jump. (Or check comment #1, because this comment foretold the future quite accurately.)

Read more…

We don’t do it for the glory, but it is nice to get some recognition once in a while (even if it is from another blog). US News and World Report’s higher education page, The Paper Trail, is running a reader poll of the year’s campus news, and we’re up there for Best Alternative Media Outlet. So, go check out the offerings, and vote your college-educated hearts out. The faster our numbers go up, the less we’ll have to self-servingly bug you about it.

Just please don’t let us get beat by Wesleyan.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

- Whoa! She almost made it—Esther Reed that is, who was attending GS under the name of a missing woman, Brooke Henson. The tale of her undoing, which the New York Post is following with all the salacious zeal of, well, the New York Post, would make a good story for your dinner at Aunt Clara’s tonight.

By the way, Columbia isn’t being obstructionist, as the article not-so-subtly claims. There really is a law that prevents them from giving people your personal information, so you can sleep soundly again.

- Your second crack at registration probably begins today, and our magical webmaster Zach “the Man” van Schouwen has whipped up a handy Firefox plug-in that will help you search CULPA that much easier. Don’t wonder how he did it, just use.

- File this under all the reasons you’re glad you didn’t go to Penn.

- If you’re not one of the 513 + people who’ve already been invited to join, the late Dogears has been supplanted…by a facebook group. Next to go, Craigslist?

- BW staffer Paul Barndt spotted Professor David Sidorsky, currently Columbia’s longest-serving member of the philosophy faculty, at Dreamgirls.

- LBD