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Sister Margaret Carney, president of St. Bonaventure University, concedes that the Princeton Review is is “a public relations problem” for the Olean-based college. More to the point, Carney sees the publication as inherently nonsensical in its method of review.</p>
<p>In recent years, Bonaventure has had the dubious distinction of being rated as having amongst the worst dorm and cafeteria food, even being put in the No. 1 slot in 2005.</p>
<p>Carney said that while the ranking caused the college to speed up “a number of changes we were going to make anyway” to food service, she doesn’t see the food service as having anything substantially “bad” about it. But once students hear or see their college attached to bad food, she said, random surveys of undergraduates by Princeton Review can result in a self-fulfilling prophecy.</p>
<p>At the same time, St. Bonaventure’s student radio station was named as the second-best in the nation, which, while heartening to hear, doesn’t necessarily make sense, Carney said.</p>
<p>“I am becoming increasingly convinced that the rankings machines make it almost impossible to present the value of an individual college ... in a truly representative manner,” she said.</p>
<p>U.S. News & World Report does solicit admissions and grading information for its rankings, and nearly every college complies with its requests — mainly out of the fear of being left out of the survey, and therefore out of the homes of high school seniors, they don’t.</p>
<p>While U.S. News’ methods are a bit more grounded in real data, University at Buffalo Provost Satish K. Tripathi said even that magazine’s methods don’t provide a clear picture of every university’s makeup.</p>
<p>“A statistic like time to graduation is a good one to keep track of, for sure,” Tripathi said. “But some students, especially international students and students with work study obligations, can’t always graduate on a normal track.</p>
<p>“For a public research university, especially, but for any school, you have to look at what its goals are, what its student makeup is ... those are things that don’t get measured.”
Anne Marie Olivo, a senior at UB who attended high school in Long Island, remembers reading through a “big book” of rankings she and her family got out from the library and looking through brochures sent by the colleges themselves when she was looking for a college.</p>
<p>“My mom was really interested in finding out about the dining halls, the cleanliness ... all those kinds of things,” Olivo said. Based on that information and some materials sent by a linguistics department, her family made a trip to Nazareth College in Rochester.</p>
<p>“It seemed like a fabulous department, until we got there and saw that it was kind of a tiny little shack in the woods somewhere,” Olivo said.</p>
<p>At UB, a conversation with a few people in the linguistics department helped cement the university as her main choice.</p>
<p>“I think I made up my mind, mostly, just by going and visiting the schools,” she said. “It was real people, who answered my questions and gave a real picture of what a department was like, that really helped.”
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<p>For those interested in college food services, St. Bonaventure University works with Aramark Education Service. Before going to SBU, Criscone was director of food services at Vassar. ARAMARK Higher Education provides food services to approximately 500 colleges and universities in the United States - many of which have "Farm-to-college" programs that connect colleges and universities with producers in their area to provide local farm products. The scope of these programs vary greatly from campus to campus. On some campuses, local produce is used only for special dinners and events, while at others local fresh food is incorporated into cafeteria meals every day.</p>
<p>More info. on The Community Food Security Coalition (CFSC) and the National Farm to College Program, which works to help farmers, food service personnel, students, faculty and others to establish and maintain farm-to-college programs can be found at:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.farmtocollege.org/list.php%5B/url%5D">http://www.farmtocollege.org/list.php</a></p>