<p>You've visited Pepperdine?</p>
<p>No.... lol</p>
<p>The ranking is kind of mish-mosh, because of the inaccuracy of the surveys. I don't give any merit to any of the rankings per se.</p>
<p>The only significant ranking I see is in the ranking for "best overall academic experience for undergraduates," not because the ranking itself has any value, but because Yale is the only university to make the list. The rest of the top 20 are all tiny schools. Yale was the highest in this category last year as well, so I sense a trend that students there are significantly happier with their academic experience than students at other Ivies/top universities.</p>
<p>The party school thing is great too, UW-Madison is an awesome party school (and not so bad academics too).</p>
<p>just so i understand it, the only category that is "significant" is the one that favors your school (yale) relative to its peers? yes, yes, of course.</p>
<p>... and I suppose 2-3 yrs ago when the hated HARVARD was unaccountably on the list for "best academic experience" and Yale didn't even make the top 20 .... well, THAT must have been one of the years when even THIS category was a "meaningless mismosh."</p>
<p>Pretty much all of the categories are "meaningless mishmosh" no matter who is in.</p>
<p>Best academic experience is hard to measure, and totally unreliable unless Chicago is somewhere near the top.</p>
<p>this sentiment didn't stop you from hooraying stanford's happiest students ranking on multiple boards.</p>
<p>Of course it didn't. We can all celebrate meaningless things. </p>
<p>Happiness, however, is significantly easier to measure than "overall academic experience."</p>
<p>On the contrary, I believe happiness to be much more ethereal and any attempt to assess "student body happiness" absurd. While there are at least a few quantitative factors involved in classifying overall academic experience (library resources, teacher to student ratio), there remains no standardized measure of student contentment. At best, both rankings should be viewed as nebulous guidelines. In reality, they are more than likely mere sparks to attract subscription base in an otherwise uneventful season.</p>
<p>You bring up a very good point. </p>
<p>However, at some schools, students tend to be happier with their college experience than at others.</p>
<p>Kenyon College beat Princeton for Most Beautiful Campus...??!!</p>
<p>Shocking...</p>