The Princeton Review released a new guidebook on April 3 entitled The Best 300 Professors. The Princeton Review creates books for high school students, ranking colleges based on different criteria from best campus food to happiest students (a list we occasionally top).

In its most recent book, The Princeton Review collaborated with RateMyProfessors.com, students and administrators from colleges across the nation. According to GoLocalProv, Brown is the only school in Rhode Island to have any professors mentioned in the book. With five professors on the list, Brown is one of the best represented colleges. So, as pre-registeration for next fall approaches, consider enrolling in a class with one of these professors, whose areas of specialty and Fall ’12 course offerings are listed below…

• Barrett Hazeltine, engineering (ENGN9)
• Joseph Pucci, classics (The Idea of Self, Fortunatus)
• Stephanie Ravillon, French (Fren30, Fren60)
• Robert Serrano, economics (Microeconomics I)
• Daniel Stupar, studio art (unlisted for Fall ’12)

And, if you’re a second semester senior and haven’t had the chance to take a class with any of these professors, at least make your way to Professor Hazeltine’s office in Barus & Holley, introduce yourself, and receive a legendary handshake.

Despite a rough midterm period, Brown aced the Trojan Sexual Health Report Card. According to the Trojan list (via HuffPo), Brown is the 4th most sexually healthy college in America. Coincidence that SexPowerGod is right around the corner? You decide.

Many would like to think that The Daily Beast is a legitimate news publication, featuring up-to-date news stories and op-ed contributions from journalistic juggernauts such as Meghan McCain. Unfortunately, actual news on The Daily Beast is merely a front, rather than a focus, that keeps the website floating somewhere in the vast expanse between TMZ and CNN.

The Beast’s bread and butter, like any other news outlet, is celebrity gossip and pop culture news. The site, however, is “unique” amongst other celebrity news websites in that it insists on presenting its pointless information of choice by making extensive slideshow lists ranging from Hollywood’s Best Worst Teachers to TV’s Best Celebrity Weddings (have you heard of any other kind of celebrity wedding these days?). Now, the editors at The Beast have decided that its random categorization approach would translate well to college rankings. If you’ve spent your life wondering which American college Tina Brown thinks is the most “Free-Spirited,” the wait is over – where Brown University stands and reactions after the jump. [Read more →]

Yesterday was a sad, sad day for Brown University. The Princeton Review rolled out its annual batch of Arbitrary College Enumerations, and our beloved Brown University was shockingly absent from the #1 spot on the  Happiest Students list. Sure we are still number three, but we were dethroned by Rice University (?) and Clemson University (double ?).

What the Princeton Review doesn’t realize is that we Brown students have never been as unhappy as we were yesterday when our crown was stolen. Jenny Bloom ’12 wept over a Meeting Street cookie wondering if “it [were] just a self-fulfilling prophecy.”  Other students have taken to the streets crying for the rightful reclamation of our title. But most students have just sat on windowsills wondering what Rice and Clemson kids have that they don’t, besides the absence of a snowy, long, depressingly cold winter–who smells unfair advantage? Huffington Post voted us the 6th most hipster school (aren’t hipsters perpetually happy rubbing their egos?) and GQ took us out of the running for douchiest college, but this doesn’t seem to have helped us. Is it because we’re the next Ivy behind Princeton, Harvard and Yale in the 2011 Forbes rankings? Why oh why, Princeton Review, would you assume that we’re even a fraction as miserable as the students at those highly depressing regarded institutions? See BlogDailyHerald’s happiness solution after the jump [Read more →]

Brown has once again made CampusGrotto’s list of the top 100 most expensive colleges.  The list maxes out at $56,420–the cost of living, eating, and going to classes at (drum roll please)…our friend to the South, Sarah Lawrence College.  Brown rolls in at a reasonable #74, with the total cost of tuition, room, and board for the 2010-2011 school year set at $50,468.

Read the full list here.

Typical Brown student?

The news magazine just released a list of the “most desirable” American universities, and Brown ranks at number 10. We’re also #9 on the list of schools for “brainiacs”, which is based on some weird calculus involving our number of Nobel Prize winners (1) and acceptance rate (14%.)

Brown was also praised as diverse (#2, just behind Penn) and gay friendly (#14).

One list we didn’t make? 25 Great Schools with Great Weather. Way to be temperature-and-precipitation normative, Newsweek.

We’ve already heard that Brown is the happiest school in the nation. Now, according to the Huffington Post, it’s also one of the most intellectual. The HuffPo cites a study carried out by the college advice website Unigo.com, which relies on student surveys to create profiles of American schools. Brown shares the honor with liberal arts colleges like Reed and Wesleyan, as well as the University of Chicago.

Will this serve to cement Brown’s reputation as the douchiest school in America or, like so many college ranking lists, fall into obscurity, only to be picked up by overzealous high school students on College Confidential? Leave us your thoughts in the comments.

Brown University has topped Princeton Review’s list of the colleges with the happiest students for the second year in a row!

Princeton Review’s annual list of the Best Colleges in the country, this year 373, will be released in book form tomorrow. It ranks the top 20 schools in 62 categories.

Brown’s also ranked on four other lists: Best College Radio Station (#5), Best College Theater (#17), Lots of Race/Class Interaction (#18), and Best Quality of Life (#18).

I don’t think anyone really knows how they tabulate these things, some kind of survey, but good for Brown students for being (perceived as) happy. This is one ranking we kick ass at (unlike cough cough US News and World Report). Not that anyone cares about that sort of thing….

Sarah Forman writes in today’s Brown Daily Herald about the University’s spike in applicants in the last few years. But the article notes that most other highly selective schools are getting similar attention, leading to a decrease in matriculation rates. A prominent college consultant told The Herald that about 95 percent of her students would choose Yale over Brown if they got into both schools. There’s no way to know for sure, but this 2005 study details preferences more specifically. Faced between Princeton and Brown, 73 percent of admitted students would choose Princeton; between Brown and Columbia, 56 percent would matriculate to Brown, according to the mathematical estimate. Read more in the next few weeks about how Brown is branding itself.

Apparently, Brown is the 20th most stressful school, according to The Daily Beast’s college stress rankings. Not sure about their ranking system, though.