Sick and tired of certain college ranking guides simply measuring how rich an undergraduate student body is, the Washington Monthly undertook a new initiative last year to rank America's colleges and universities. Their perogative: to rank how much a university or college is benefiting the country. The rankings revolve around three broad categories: research output, public service, and social mobility. Last year, Cornell ranked fourth in the nation. But this year, Cornell slipped to eighth. This seems mostly due to a change in the methodology that gives more weight to those schools with low-performing student bodies (as measured by SAT scores) and high graduation rates. As a result, Penn State, UC-San Diego, and Texas A&M have all edged out Cornell in this year's rankings. Moreover, Cornell and Stanford have swapped relative positions from this year to last -- Cornell used to rank just above Stanford, but now the opposite is true. Methodological changes aside, Cornellians can still be very proud of their University's contributions to contemporary American society -- especially relative to some other nameless schools in the northeast.
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