DePauw ranks in U.S. News and World Report, Princeton Review

By: Angela To

Posted: 8/28/07

U.S. News and World Report published "America's Best Colleges 2008" on Aug. 15, and the University landed on the list at 49.

DePauw tied with Pitzer College in California and Rhodes College in Tennessee. The University was ranked along with 266 other liberal arts schools in the United States. As reported in the Aug. 18 issue of The DePauw, the latest rankings will be the last in which the University will wholly participate, due to a disagreement with the news magazine's evaluation methods.

The student input survey published by the Princeton Review ranked DePauw in several campus-life categories. The University topped the list of greek life on campus. WGRE was listed as the third best college radio station. DePauw was ranked as the 16th school with more to do on campus as opposed to within the surrounding community and seventh with strained town-gown relations.

The University was placed at 10th for consumption of hard liquor and landed in the runner-up position for beer intake. Executive Vice President Neal Abraham did not comment about why DePauw went up in the alcohol rankings but did question the accuracy of the sample for the Princeton Review.

"In the past, the number of respondents from DePauw was very low. It is hard to get accurate information and fair assessments when only a few respondents are used," Abraham said. "I don't know about the statistics of how many respondents there were and how they were selected for the most recent survey."

DePauw's placement on the Princeton Review list for alcohol consumption was a surprise to some students.

"I'm not a big partier, so I don't see a lot of alcohol consumption, but I'm kind of shocked that it's that high," said sophomore Andrea Stathopoulos.

For those students who do attend parties regularly. however, the alcohol rankings were not unexpected.

"[The rankings] are probably pretty true, just because that's all there is to do in Greencastle. If you go out on a Friday or Saturday night, you see people [drinking] everywhere," said junior Carly Halon. "I know that we had party the other night and we had four cases of beer in our fridge for a small party."