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.

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.

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.

SGA’s Ecorep Liaison, Illana Krakowski, also stopped by to encourage all Barnard students to ask for recycling bins in doors. For those sick of Hewitt fare, there is also a potluck dinner on Oct 15th at 6pm in Sulzberger Lobby, as well as Hewitt’s annual Harvest Dinner, on Oct 28th at 6pm, and both should be delicious. For those clubs willing to take the time and effort to be more environmentally friendly, there is also a Club Sustainability Tip Sheet available, which gives you several ways to “go green!”

Amy Chen, VP of Student Activities, also had good news to offer Barnard sorority sisters: they will have a graduate assistant to advise Greek organizations on Barnard’s campus! 

October 21st is also Barnard’s ‘Women in Science’ town hall; all those who have an opinion about the Science requirement are encouraged to attend, especially those who like this requirement (such strange ones do exist).

Nostalgia set in with your reporter when the final topic turned to SGA’s Breakfast in Bed event, where SGA students will go around the quad giving breakfast to first-years on October 27th. And as if free food weren’t enough, SGA was also quick to point out that Millie the Bear would be present. First years, get ready for a whole lot of dancing and pancakes, while the rest of you BC students can watch in envy, or, better yet, try to steal leftovers.

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.

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.)

1. Harvard

2. Princeton

3. Yale

4. MIT

4. Stanford

6. Cal Tech

6. U. Penn

8. Columbia

8. Duke

8. U. of Chicago

11. Dartmouth

12. Northwestern

12. Wash U St. Louis

14. Cornell

15. Johns Hopkins

16. Brown

17. Rice

18. Emory

18. Notre Dame

18. Vanderbilt

21. Berkeley

22. Carnegie Mellon

23. Georgetown

23. U. of Virginia

25. UCLA

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