The Princeton Review’s Skewed Reality of Higher Ed.

New York University is #1 on a list of “Top 10 Dream Colleges in the U.S.”, says a report posted on CNN, Netscape, and AOL and also cited in The Daily Princetonian and The Harvard Crimson. Following NYU, in successive order, are Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Duke, Cornell, and UCLA (go Bruins!). The list was created by The Princeton Review on the basis of a survey administered to a sample of 3,890 college applicants. The survey asked, "What 'dream college' would you most like to attend were prospects of acceptance or cost not issues?"

The Top 10 list is based on responses to a survey included in The Princeton Review’s Best 361 Colleges book and is so grossly unscientific and unrepresentative of the opinions of American college-bound students that it is hard to believe that it was reported as news. An MTV.com poll on who’s better--Kanye West or Usher--has more credibility and logic behind it than the Princeton Review’s survey!

The list, which is part of the college rankings craze, exists completely apart from the reality of higher education enrollments, which is that only a small fraction of college students attend highly selective schools, like those on The Princeton Review Top 10 list. The majority of college students attend universities that admit more than 60% of their applicants, and the number of undergraduates who attend Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, Brown, and Columbia combined is less than the 33,000 students at the University of Florida (boo Gators).

Disregard The Princeton Review list. The U.S. News & World Report rankings are way more systematic.