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These news items about residential colleges and the renewal of university life are posted for readers of the Collegiate Way website. To receive an occasional digest of this news please add your name to the monthly Collegiate Way mailing list.

The Google College Rankings

Posted by R. J. O’Hara for the Collegiate Way

7 September 2008 (collegiateway.org) — Thump. The wood-pulp-based U.S. News college rankings have hit the newsstands again. Do people still go to newsstands?

This year Princeton traded places with Yale, which edged out Stanford, which jumped past Harvard, which beat Princeton. What’s more, Amherst topped Swarthmore, which passed Williams, which beat Amherst. Or something.

Does anyone under 60 really follow this? It doesn’t even have a Twitter feed.

It’s time to bring the college rankings business into the new millennium and smash the forest-destroying furry-animal-killing monopoly that is U.S. News.

My new college ranking system will do just that. It is built around a network of thousands of computers which are processing, moment by moment, billions of bits of reputational information. The raw rankings generated by this system are fed through a proprietary opto-synaptic nanofilter called the Bio-Regulatory Auto-Integrating Nexus (patent pending), which generates human-readable results. By means of this way-complicated procedure I can assign a unique CollegeRank™ to every institution.

Against the advice of my venture capital team I have decided to make the unfiltered data available to the public, confident that without the application of my Bio-Regulatory Auto-Integrating Nexus (patent pending) they will be meaningless.

Go to Google and enter the word “university.”

WARNING: Do not let high school students have access to these unfiltered results. If these raw rankings are not processed through my Bio-Regulatory Auto-Integrating Nexus, little Billy and little Susie may end up sending their college applications to Wikipedia.org.

Why are my rankings better than the U.S. News rankings? Because the U.S. News rankings are old. My rankings are new. The U.S. News rankings are wood pulp. My rankings are flat screen. The U.S. News rankings are 1.0. My rankings are 2.0. The U.S. News rankings are gossip. My rankings are science.

U.S. News publishes its rankings once a year. I publish mine once a week. In fact, the rankings below have almost certainly been superseded already. (Brandeis was #20 just a few minutes ago, but it has since dropped out of the top 25. Sic transit gloria mundi.) A special Platinum Membership Program will be available to university presidents who wish to receive hourly updates that track the network Everflux directly. Applications for Platinum Membership must be accompanied by a certificate of health from a registered cardiologist.

Enough prolegomena. America’s best universities, let me show u them:

  1. Harvard University (1985)1,2
  2. Stanford University (1985)
  3. University of Virginia (1986)
  4. University of Washington (1986)
  5. University of Michigan (1985)
  6. Yale University (1987)
  7. University of Arizona (1986)
  8. University of Georgia (1988)
  9. University of Florida (1986)
  10. Duke University (1986)
  11. University of Wisconsin (1985)
  12. University of Pennsylvania (1986)
  13. Purdue University (1985)
  14. Cornell University (1985)
  15. Princeton University (1987)
  16. Georgetown University (1986)
  17. Johns Hopkins University (1987)
  18. Northwestern University (1999)
  19. | University of Miami (1987)3
  20. Boston University (1986)
  21. University of California (1985)
  22. University of Minnesota (1987)
  23. University of Iowa (1988)
  24. University of Illinois (1997)
  25. New York University (1986)

1 The dates shown are the dates of domain activation for each institution. Attending a domain activated after 1987 will pretty much kill your chances of getting a job at Goldman Sachs.

2 A user examining only the raw data might conclude that the University of Texas should rank near the top of this list, but that demonstrates how deceptive the unfiltered results are. UT as a whole is piggybacking on the popularity of one of its internal webpages: a list of links to other colleges and universities. (“Dear Admissions Officer: Ur pg of links is k00l. Plz snd me an aPpLiCaTiOn, k?”)

3 The | University of Miami is believed to be the same as the University of Miami, but this has not been verified on the ground.

ALL WELL AND GOOD, you say. But what if Billy doesn’t want to go to a big impersonal university? What if he wants to go to a friendly liberal arts college instead, preferably one with cows?

No problem. My system ranks liberal arts colleges just as well as big universities. When the raw data are filtered through my Bio-Regulatory Auto-Integrating Nexus (patent pending), we get the following definitive ranking:

  1. Oberlin College (1986)
  2. Amherst College (1990)
  3. Hampshire College (1988)
  4. Ithaca College (1990)
  5. Williams College (1986)
  6. Harvard College (1985)1
  7. Dartmouth College (1986)
  8. Calvin College (1989)
  9. Reed College (1990)
  10. Middlebury College (1989)

1 For $35 billion you can get listed as both a university and a college.

BUT THERE’S MORE. The U.S. News rankings are local. My rankings are global.

Does Susie want to go to school as far away from you as possible? No problem. My system can calculate the CollegeRank™ of every university in every country in the world and generate the necessary league tables.

Perhaps Great Britain will strike her fancy:

  1. University of Cambridge
  2. University of Oxford
  3. University of Birmingham
  4. University of Manchester
  5. University of Leeds
  6. University of Edinburgh
  7. Durham University
  8. University of Warwick
  9. University College London
  10. Coventry University

If Great Britain isn’t far enough, how about Australia:

  1. Monash University
  2. University of Sydney
  3. University of Queensland
  4. Macquarie University
  5. Griffith University
  6. University of New South Wales
  7. University of Melbourne
  8. RMIT University
  9. University of Adelaide
  10. University of Newcastle

The full set of international rankings will be available through my special Passport to College Program™, which will include a personalized list of great-circle distances from the parental domicile to any ten universities of your choice.

WILL A MERE BACHELOR’S DEGREE not satisfy your ambition? No problem. My system can provide definitive, scientific rankings for medical schools, business schools, and law schools too:

  1. Harvard Law School
  2. Columbia Law School
  3. Yale Law School
  4. Stanford Law School
  5. University of Chicago Law School
  6. University of Michigan Law School
  7. Cornell Law School
  8. University of Minnesota Law School
  9. University of Wisconsin Law School
  10. University of Pennsylvania Law School

U.S. NEWS had its day, but now the sun is setting, the tide is turning, and the wheels of progress are rolling on. The future belongs to the search engine optimizers of the world, and to the Google college rankings.


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© Robert J. O’Hara 2000–2008