<p>What fatthermit said - total # of books is a better measure than # of books/ student. Penn is comparable to Cornell in # of books/student because they are the 2 Ivies w. the largest enrollments.</p>
<p>Anyway, a building full of chopped up dead trees is an increasingly obsolete measure of quality. </p>
<p>The USNWR scores take into account MANY different factors and not just one area and this is what gives them such meaning and popular importance. They are like democracy - the worst possible system, except for all the others. If you pick out some isolated stat - # of books/ student, admit rate, in the ridiculous Newsweek HS “ratings” the # of AP courses/ student, # of roadkill armadillos/ student (Texas A&M), you can alway come up with some stat that will cast your favorite school in a good light and Penn (or some other school) in a bad light. But USWNR has come up with a method that doesn’t depend on one single factor but rather presents an overall measure of quality - not a perfect one but one that is pretty decent. You can say that the USNWR ratings might be off by as much as 5 (or if you are not a fan, say 10) places but beyond that it really gets tough to quibble. A rating system that is accurate to within 10 places out of the many thousands of US colleges is not so bad - if you are thinking about applying to any particular school, you should be screening the ten schools above and below it in the rankings anyway.</p>