<p>GW received...</p>
<h1>1...Most Politically Active</h1>
<h1>3...Best Dorms</h1>
<h1>3...Best College Town</h1>
<p>Unfortunately, none of which are related to academics.</p>
<p>But the admission selectivity rating is VERY high, which is 95 (on a 60-99 scale). </p>
<p>Also, the academic rating is not bad, which is 87. I compared it with University of Maryland @College Park and Penn State University Park. Theirs are 75 and 73.</p>
<p>i agree with the political (although that seems a bit high for their activity) and town rankings. however, when i visited gw i didn't think there dorms were that nice. i actually found them to be very cramped. in one dorm i think they had something like 6 people and one person's bed seemed to be in a closet. i guess we all have different conceptions of what a palace is. btw, how are american and gtown lower on the rankings given the fact that they all in the same city? gtown imo is in a better area of dc, since it is right off all of the m street shops and gw is in more of an area where offices are located, but nonetheless gtown is lower on the list.</p>
<p>You probably visited one of the freshmen dorms, which are not too nice on FB. It is the upperclassmen dorms that are "palaces". </p>
<p>Georgetown is in a nicer area than GW. However, GW is close to everything, while Georgetown is far from everything but shopping. I guess that is where the ranking comes from.</p>
<p>armcp~ this seems to be my night for emailing you! your question about rankings is an important one. AU and GW are identical schools, with GW being total city and AU being on "embassy row". yet the rankings, if we continue to look to USNEWS as uncontested doctrine, are very far apart. USNEWS uses endowment and presidential votes as their largest variables in their rankings, NOT the things we think it means,ie,academics, etc.!</p>
<p>How are they "identical"?</p>
<p>i disagree. endowments are crucial to forging a top university. they basically determine the size of projects a university is able to take on and therefore larger endowments result in the university becoming more well known for such projects. in gw's defense they do have the largest endowment of dc schools. this is pretty commendable considering they have to compete with georgetown. this is probably why gw is such a much more well known and higher ranked school than american which in my opinion isn't very widely known outside of the beltway. also since g-town and gw's names are somewhat similar a think sometimes people get them confused and there is a bit of undue prestige transfer from g-town to gw. i once told someone i got into gw and they were overly impressed. after further conversation, he realized that i wasn't talking about what he thought was georgetown.</p>