<p>WashU is an excellent school. It has a beautiful campus in a suburban area of St. Louis (extremely safe) adjacent to Forest Park. The facilities are excellent and the dorms are really really nice. I love the fact that its academics are so flexible. You can pretty much major in anything, including business and engineering, regardless of whether you specified that major on your initial application, and many many students double major. The faculty are caring and generally value good teaching and obviously the student body is strong. </p>
<p>While Wash U might have taken some steps to move up in USNWR rankings, it is clearly not alone in doing so, and I believe that Wash U deserves to be ranked among the top schools in the country.</p>