The Daily Beast, an online subsidiary of Newsweek, ranked Binghamton University No. 1 on a list of schools that “will get you a top-notch degree for the least amount of work.” Let’s try to unpack this.
First, this actually appears to be perhaps the biggest backhanded compliment our school has ever received. After all, it ranks Binghamton as a school at which you can earn a high-quality degree. Who are we to argue with that?
For years Binghamton has tried to establish itself as the premiere “Public Ivy,” attempting to draw students away from comparable, yet bigger (better known) state schools such as the University of Florida, University of Wisconsin and University of Maryland. They were ranked two, three and five, respectively.
If any publicity is good publicity, we should be grateful for our spot on this list. And if anything, prospective students will salivate at the idea of putting in less work, while still getting a high-quality degree.
But the rubric and grounds for the website’s ranking are vague and have us wondering how BU even earned this esteemed distinction in the first place.
The rankings list several pieces of data. For each school, it includes a student-to-faculty ratio, average SAT scores, www.ratemyprofessors.com ranking, freshman retention rate and the College Prowler “Most Manageable Workload” rank. The numbers are placed before us in plain sight, we just don’t know what to make of of the seemingly critical data points.
Our College Prowler “Most Manageable Workload” rank was a 5.33 out of 7, whatever that means. If these are the grounds on which the rigor of our school is being judged, it will be tough for any of us to make sense of the ranking and determine what it means for us as students.
Naturally, there are many of us here unhappy with our spot in the rankings, and these people are completely justified. Students spending hours at a time at an engineering lab or on the fourth floor of the Glenn G. Bartle Library have the right to be fired up at any source that throws haymakers at the size of their workload.
But it’s difficult for the Editorial Board or anyone here at Pipe Dream to feel anything more than ambivalence toward these rankings. We don’t necessarily represent the most accurate cross section of academia at Binghamton University and can’t speak to the rigor of a majority of the fields of study at BU.
Our one point of concern, though: If employers are under the impression that graduates of Binghamton University aren’t working as hard as their contemporaries at other schools, it doesn’t bode well for us.
Until then, the grounds for this list are up in the air, and we have no reason to fear the worst. As students, we know how hard we may or may not work, and we don’t much need an illegitimate ombudsman to come in and tell us how rigorous our courses are. Take our ranking on this list with one giant grain of salt.