Time for the new rankings!

Forbes reports.

College Ranking Season Is Upon Us

The 2016 Trend Topper MediaBuzz of the Top 419 College Brands, 10th Edition has come out, and under Methodology, one reads: “For this analysis, the Global Language Monitor used its proprietary Brand Affiliation Index (BAI), the same technology used to measure global brand equity for the Olympics, World Cup, the Fortune 500, and others. This exclusive GLM longitudinal study encompasses the prior three years to better assess short-term velocity and longer-term momentum. The study is a Big Data textual analysis based on billions of webpages, millions of blogs, the 375,000 global print and electronic media, and new social media formats as they appear. This is the ninth edition of the survey since it first appeared in 2008.”

My first reaction to all of this information is, with apologies to the Bard, “Oh, Brave New World that has such rankings in it!” My second reaction is to examine the Top 50 US Colleges for 2015, because I attended one, Amherst College, will soon work for another, Drew University, and have been to almost every other one on the list within the last ten years. The differences between such institutions are significant, so my instinct is to deconstruct the list just a bit. Before doing so, if I understand the methodology (and I may not), my simply mentioning Amherst (#31), and Drew (#43), may move the rankings needle a scintilla in their favor.