In this year’s set of student-voted College Rankings, Unigo.com has published lists from “Wifi? Wifi Not?” and “50 Shades of Cray” to the more straightforward “Famous Recent Grads” and “New Ivies 2013.” Boston University made it onto two Top 10 lists, “Happiest Students” and “Most Famous Faculty.”
More than 30,000 students voted to determine the rankings, which expanded this year to 12 from 10 in the previous two years, it’s website said. Despite Dean of Students Kenneth Elmore’s affinity for Twitter, BU missed the cut on the “Social Net-Working It” list.
On the “Happiest Students” list, BU ranked third, with students citing the school’s size and urban location as positives. College of Arts and Sciences sophomore Joyce Kim also said she likes the social opportunities the school’s size (18,140 undergraduates) provides, saying, “I hang out with a lot of different people and it never feels cliquey.”
According to the list, BU voters wrote that “many students meet their future closest friends during their freshman year in the dorms. On nice days, students take in the city of Boston, or hang out on the ‘BU beach,’ a park behind the College of Arts and Sciences.”
BU was the third-largest school on that list, after the University of Wisconsin-Madison (which ranked first) and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (ninth). Four of the 10 schools – BU, Wisconsin, George Washington University and Barnard College – are in city settings.
Some of the professors who propelled BU to No. 8 on the “Most Famous Faculty” list include Robert Pinsky, who served as Poet Laureate of the U.S. from 1997 to 2000 and now teaches in the Creative Writing Department; Bob Zelnick, a College of Communication professor who was executive editor of the Frost-Nixon interviews; and, likely the best-known, Elie Wiesel, the author of Night, who teaches in the Departments of Religion and Philosophy.
The “Famous Faculty” list also noted any well-known speakers the university has hosted in recent years. Katie Couric and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who were BU’s 2011 and 2012 commencement speakers, were mentioned.
BU is in good company on that list, joining three Ivies (Yale, Harvard and Columbia) as well as Stanford University.
fact checker • Sep 1, 2012 at 6:50 pm
Fact: Eric Holder is NOT a Google CEO.