The U.S. Department of Education recently released a list of the top 25 freshmen retention rates of private colleges and universities. The difference between consecutive rankings here comes down to a fraction of a percent—Brown has an average retention rate of 97.5 percent, coming in at an unlucky a respectable thirteenth place. According to a Yahoo! news report, this officially renders Brown the school with the thirteenth happiest freshmen. The equivalency being presumed between retention and happiness can be easily deconstructed and dismissed, but it’s easier just to point out how irrelevant Yahoo! is.

Unfortunately, they aren’t the only ones that mark these statistics as a measure of our  happiness—HuffPo and CBS News, among others, do the same. We always find it disconcerting when studies attempt to calculate the amount of happiness someone has (or a group people have), but in this case it is particularly discomforting as Princeton is ranked happiest. Sorry, but if this letter situation is happening at your school, you can’t win the happy-go-lucky award. Also, Princeton sorta just sounds sad. (Whoever said orange was the new black was seriously disturbed.)

We commend these sites for trying to gauge our happiness, but laugh at their shortcomings. [Read more →]

Brown placed sixth on USA Today College’s list of “25 healthiest colleges in the country.” The article recognized our “accessible sexual health resources, positive reviews of the health centers, condom availability, health awareness programs for students, STI testing on campus,” and our number-two spot on Trojan’s 2012 sexual health report card.

But here’s the kicker: It’s kind of funny that in explaining why we placed sixth, USA Today College cited our—wait for it—crepe bar. The fact that the crepe bar is mentioned as a “healthy option” may confuse almost every student who dabbles in Sunday brunch. Public Health concentrators are facepalming everywhere. Sure, it may be the reason we go to the Ratty on a Sunday, but we’re not checking out the crepe bar—chock-full of chocolate sauce, whipped cream, and strawberry sauce (yes, sauce, not fruit)—to stay fit. That’s what Blue Room salads are for.

The article also showed some love for the “Roots and Shoots” line at the Ratty, for its vegetarian, vegan, and locally grown options. For those of us who are vegetarian or vegan at Brown, Roots and Shoots is the Ratty.  Seriously though—I dare you to find a vegan student on campus who doesn’t eat the brown rice pilaf at least three times a week. Or you can just take my word for it and focus on your finals.

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Yes, BuzzFeed went there and we emerged victorious. Click to enlarge.

Think you’re sexy, cute and fucking smart to boot? BuzzFeed has now confirmed your hubris. According to an index derived from useless rankings from Forbes and DateMySchool, Brown is the Sexiest, Smartest College in the United States of America. With 5th place hotness and 19th place academics, Brown crowded out several other Ivies (including Harvard and Princeton) and the notoriously sexy-smart (?) Carnegie Mellon for the top spot. Take a stomp around the Main Green and breathe in the sultry intelligence that is the Brown student body. Raise your eyes from your computer in the AQR and check out the nubile nerds that populate its silent space. And tonight while you’re making love to a stunning coed, recite some of Plato’s Symposium for good measure.

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Perhaps you are enjoying a bag of delicious Deep River kettle cooked potato chips as you read this, or pigging out on multiple rounds of some sugary Ratty treat (or both… I don’t judge), but don’t feel too guilty about indefinitely prolonging the Freshman 15 your unhealthy eating choices. Overall, we’re considered a pretty healthy bunch!

According to the health and fitness website greatist.com, Brown ranks 6th on their list of “25 Healthiest Colleges in the US.” The website commends our locally grown food options, and vegetarian/vegan alternatives. Not surprisingly, they also mention our excellent Health Services, specifically those relating to sexual health and safety. So, next time you feel like complaining about Brown’s allegedly crappy dining hall food or subpar health services, just remember that there are those who think otherwise! Who cares if some Harvard-adoring academic ranking systems don’t realize our true merit – I’m looking at you, US News & World Report Rankings – rejoice because we’ve got great access to healthy food and condoms!

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This is not the kind of ranking you’d usually expect to hear about Brown. We’re used to #1 douchiest or #5 most stressful, things like that. But, believe it or not, graduateprograms.com – the sites with self-descriptive names are always the sketchy ones – has ranked us 2nd in the country for our graduate engineering program. Graduateprograms.com, which, according to Brown Engineering’s website, may or may not also be known as graduatestudents.com, put us only .1 “stars” behind leader Cornell – BOOOOO – and ahead of traditional leaders in the field such as M.I.T. and Carnegie Mellon. Just a few years after the creation of the undergrad engineering school, it seems the program as a whole is doing quite well.

This award, however, might not be the most important discovery of the day. Brown Engineering’s site has also taken the single most misleading flattering picture of Barus & Holley that could ever be imagined (see above). To the genius photographer responsible for this: PLEASE find us a similar angle for the Scili Desert.

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Long gone are the days when Brown was the happiest school. The Daily Beast has ranked Brown the sixth most stressful school behind Northwestern, Harvard, Columbia, UPenn, and WashU. Perhaps a Rhode Island marijuana legalization could go a long way after all.

I’ve always thought the SciLi was comparable to Mordor.

The rankings were calculated by the total price of tuition, the percentage of students receiving financial aid, selectivity based on the average SAT or ACT score, and the percentage of applicants admitted. A small weight was given to the amount of crime in the area (all those DPS alerts do make my heart rate go up…).  Brown, with a tuition of $56,150 a year (thanks, Mom and Dad), 49% on financial aid and 9% admission rates, starts to look pretty stressful.

Of the 25 most stressful schools, Brown ranks 15th in the “most crime” category. Go figure.

Hopefully these rankings will emotionally validate some pre-med and engineering students.

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Highly suspect.

Many Brunonians don’t acknowledge the existence of Rhode Island beyond College Hill. In our Brunonian Bubble, we have Blue State, Starbucks, Mister Sister, and the Duck & Bunny. Things seem pretty good. Not according to 24/7 Wall Street, which calculated the best and worst run states using GDP growth, employment rates, and debt management. The goal was to figure out which state best utilized its resources to the full effect. The result? Rhode Island ranks second-worst, just ahead of California.

Hey, at least our state is ahead of the Kardashian’s.

Rhode Island’s unemployment rate stands at  11.3%, which is the third highest in the country. Additionally, 14.7% of residents live below the poverty line. The state has 9.5 billion in unpaid debts. Meanwhile, the best-run state is… North Dakota (?), followed by Wyoming, Nebraska, Utah, and Iowa. I guess living out West might really be best.

In all seriousness, these rankings are a wake up call to the poor state of the Ocean State and its residents.

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For all of you who actually care about college rankings, you shouldn’t. They’re arbitrary and irrelevant to your college experience. No matter how useless these rankings might be, however, it’s still nice to have some bragging rights over our fellow Ivy foes.

Behold, the most useless ranking of all time: Brown is the best college in the world according to Best 50 Colleges, an extremely credible sketchy website claiming to have a more comprehensive methodology than the typical college-ranking powerhouses. Supposedly, the site considers “important” aspects of college life in its “complex algorithm”: how many TAs a school has, whether or not it has professional chefs (they clearly haven’t been to the Gate), the size of the its dorm rooms, and how many famous people have gone there, among other things. Whether you buy into it or not, at least we beat Harvard. HA!

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Over the years, the Brown student body has accumulated all types of labels and rankings: happiest, douchiest, trendiest. Now we can add entrepreneurial to the list: Forbes published a list of the most entrepreneurial colleges and used LinkedIn profiles to identify graduates who have founded companies with ten or more employees. Out of twenty schools, Brown came in at No. 13.

The inside caps of the Nantucket Nectars bottles feature facts about the founders Tom First '89 and Tom Scott '90.

This ranking is not at all surprising: From on-campus businesses like MunchCard to national brands such as Nantucket Nectars, Brunonians have always had a flair for startups. Classes like Professor Hazeltine’s Engn90: Managerial Decision Making require students to make business plans that start as class assignments but often become actual companies later. Entrepreneurship runs in Brunonians’ veins.

In other rankings news, Forbes also released their list of America’s top colleges on which Brown came in at No. 19. In The Daily Beast’s yearly crop of rankings, we ranked 23rd for most liberal (only 23rd? Really?) and in sixth for most stressful, a ranking that seems to be based on a combination of financial aid, acceptance rates, and crime. Needless to say, if Orgo were part of the criteria, we probably would have placed higher in this category. This aforementioned stress may have something to do with the fact that we’re now considered fourth happiest. Sure, this ranking is a bit lower than what we’re used to, but here’s to hoping that Princeton Review’s 2013 rankings will bring us better news in the happiness category.

The strangest ranking of all? Brown tied for 49th (with China’s Peking University) on Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings. Had Brunonia scored just a few points higher, we could’ve tied with the University of Minnesota. Yes, you read that right.

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Sir Kensington's Gourmet Ketchup is the Ratty's newest addition.

The Daily Meal, an online food and drink blog, recently re-ranked the country’s “Top 20 universities“ based exclusively on the quality of their dining services. Even though the writers praised Brown’s ability to cater to vegetarian and kosher eaters, we still came in close to last out of the 20 schools, with our ranking at #18.

The number one school on the list, Washington University in St. Louis, might offer a kitchen space where students can learn to make sushi, but I doubt its dining halls can get fratty like the Ratty. And, as if the Ratty didn’t have enough surprises over the weekend, today it introduced Sir Kensington’s Gourmet Scooping Ketchup — a brand created by two Brown alums.

We might only be #18 on the Daily Meal list, but at least we have alternative ketchup, Gail, and as of tomorrow, Mama Kim’s at the Blue Room.