For some, a college ranking means nothing at all, while others heavily rely on a university’s “rank” for getting into graduate school or making their resume stand out in a pile of job hopefuls. Blame the economy, but those standard college rankings are meaning less and less to employers, which has caused the higher learning industry to resort to weird and zany college rankings that may draw headlines, but do little else.
- Smartest guys and girls. This isn’t so weird or zany, but it is rather pointless. Being surrounded by smart guys and gals will force you to up your game, but it won’t necessarily make you smarter. In some cases, being around highly intelligent people can make you feel inadequate, especially if you’re adjusting to other things like a new environment and making new friends. Who cares if the smartest guys and girls are at your school? What matters is the school is a wise fit for your learning style.
- Girls. Yep. One of the strangest college rankings is plain ol’ girls. We all know there’s a bevy of college comedies that portray campuses as being the easiest place to get laid, but in reality, most girls are there to learn. Collegeprowler ranks schools on girls and those with a high rank means there’s a plentiful supply of attractive, friendly girls on campus and the ration of women to men is high.
- Off campus housing. This is a silly college ranking because off campus housing varies depending on how far or close you’ll live to the school and your budget. While this ranking from Collegeprowler does take into account things like cost of living and traffic you’ll encounter getting to campus, it’s still such a general .
- Weather. Sure, the weather makes a difference, but would you really choose a school based on it? It may be something to take into account when choosing a school, but it should hardly be sited as a means of ranking a university. If you’re from a very cold or very warm climate, it may be difficult to adjust, but we suggest looking into specific programs and career counseling before taking weather into account.
- Party schools. This isn’t so weird anymore, as PR has given the title a major boost in the past decade. Playboy magazine has dished out the title in recent years, taking into account female to male ratio, alcohol consumption and the medicinal medicine facility nearby. This results in tens of thousands of students lighting up on April 20th. Talk about new traditions.
- Worst housing. This isn’t usually the first thing you look at when examining which school to commit to. Housing is bad across the board when it comes to living on campus, but for safety purposes, many schools are requiring freshman to live on campus. This means you may have no choice but to live in a tiny space that’s been around for decades. This is common for older universities where renovations might have been done in the 1980s. You’re there for school, not to improve your interior design skills (unless your major is interior design, of course).
- Worst parking. Unless you’re living off campus, you shouldn’t have to worry about parking too much. Many of the colleges ranked are in New York City, which begs the idea – learn to use the subway! There’s nothing that says you can’t truck it to school on foot, especially if you’re living on campus. Even if parking is an issue, you can always learn the ropes and park your car in a specific spot through the week while you attend classes and then you can limit the parking song and dance to weekends.
- Worst food. When you’re cramming for exams, you have to eat. If you’re a freshman or anyone living on campus, you may have a meal plan which forces you to eat at the various school cafeterias or food vendors throughout the school year. Some of the worst food can be found at pricey colleges, which means you may want to think about stockpiling Cup O’ Noodle before signing up for a year long meal plan.
- Greenest campus. It’s no wonder that the majority of these campuses are small schools. This means less of everything, making them more green. Beyond that, these schools are actively making changes or building with the planet in mind. For students who love the environment and want to be involved with organizations that focus on environmental issues, this may play a large role in choosing a campus.
- Best performance venue. Unless you’re a drama major, this probably doesn’t mean much to you, but it still exists as a strange college ranking. For best performance venue, acoustics and lighting are taken into consideration. We aren’t sure how this matters for anyone other than a drama professor who becomes a possessed director for seasonal plays, but it’s something to take into account if you plan on seeing your name in lights.
These unusual and strange college rankings may make you chuckle, but never let them dictate your decision on where to go to school. Meeting with a school counselor and getting a feel for the campus and extra curricular activities is the best way to envision yourself at that learning institution and see if it’s the right fit.
The word university is derived from the Latin “universitas magistrorum et scholarium,” which translated into English means “community of teachers and scholars.” Now referred to as university for short, the origin of institutes of higher learning are as old as the language they are based on. Thought to be in some circles as a place where the privileged go to earn even more of an edge, the actual history of colleges is far more complex and diverse.
To see for yourself, check out the below list of the 15 oldest colleges in the world. Although history can be a difficult thing to nail down, we have listed the schools mostly by date of alleged foundation and have even included a few that have unfortunately ceased to exist. [click to continue…]
Are you sad that you have an Android phone instead of an iPhone because of the lack of apps? Never fear — just a little patience and you’ll have all the apps you need. This list of 40 awesome Android apps for college students provides examples of some high-class apps that will help you float through that undergraduate or graduate degree with confidence. [click to continue…]
Petite USB drives, already handy for carrying data, are becoming more useful and powerful. The open-standard platform of the U3 smart technology from a company called U3 allows users to securely run U3-compliant applications without leaving a trace of data on the host computer. This new technology is available for any PC, and apps for this utility, in addition to regular USB drives, are included in our list of 51 productive and petite apps that every student should put on their USB drive. [click to continue…]
One of the latest social media applications that has been getting a great deal of buzz is…Google’s Buzz. Google rolled out Buzz not too long ago, with the hope that it would become the next be social media thing. Google is hoping that the fact that Gmail users automatically access Buzz will help it continue. Also helping is the fact that Buzz makes it easy to connect Buzz to other social media feeds, creating a hub of sorts for your various social media accounts, including Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and your Blogger profile. [click to continue…]
Video collections can offer hours of entertainment, but they also can provide users with hours of education. YouTube offers a venue for many college videos, for instance. If you go to that link and type in, “University of Michigan lectures,” you can find many lectures offered by Richie Hawtin — an English-Canadian electronic musician and internationally-touring DJ who was an influential part of Detroit techno’s second wave of artists in the early 1990s. In these videos, Hawtin discusses how technology is changing the way music is played, produced and experienced. [click to continue…]
Thanks to the Internet, learning and education are becoming possible to nearly anyone. No longer is it necessary to sit in a classroom or follow the accepted methods of teaching that many of us are familiar with. Instead, it is now possible to learn what we want, when we want and at our own pace. Additionally, it is possible to use the Internet to complement more traditional forms of learning and supplement what is learned in school. If you want to get into online education and learning, here are 50 blogs that can help you find your way: [click to continue…]
The college football season is just around the corner. After all, EA Sports’ NCAA Football ’10 comes out next week! Are you looking for a great college football blog to follow? Thousands of great college football blogs vie for your attention on the Web. But, we managed to narrow those numbers down to the top 100 college football blogs, categorized below. [click to continue…]
Do you use college rankings such as The Princeton Review or Peterson’s to learn more about prospective colleges? If you have, you may have missed some significant rankings on the schools of your choice. Rankings that consider your dorm room, food, parties and more — in other words, your social life.
Open courseware has expanded to the extent that directories, lists, search engines, archives and Web tools are available free to anyone who chooses to learn through the Internet. The following list contains some individual tools, but on the whole, this list is filled with links to sites and pages that offer more links to even more resources. So, if you’re looking for an open source tool to create a video, go under “tools” below to find two links to sites filled with open source software resources.
All links under the categories below are listed in alphabetical order. This alphabetical method of organization also shows that we do not value open courseware project over another. [click to continue…]
