Apparently, August 13^th is the new April Fools day at Forbes Magazine. Within two weeks of ranking Dartmouth THE top school for post-graduate earnings 10 years out from college, Forbes has ranked the Big Green 127^th out of the top 569 American academic institutions. In front of it lie prestigious institutions with impressive median SAT scores fully 400 points below ours, 93% admittance rates, endowments literally thousands of times smaller, and substantially larger student to faculty ratios.

Dartmouth is ranked behind Covenant College, Randolph-Macon College, Centre College, Principia College, and Carson-Newman College--just to name a few. Interestingly, Dartmouth isn't the only school to be whimsically placed: evidently the New College of Florida is better than half of the Ivies, Connecticut College is better than U Penn, and MIT should aspire to become more like Wabash, and Stanford more like Haverford. No surprise, then, that Dartmouth should aim to become more like Principia College--a school that brags about being "the only school in the world for Christian Scientists" (and thus presumably lacks a health center).

At this point the reader may reasonably conclude that the methodology of the rankings (if you can call it that) could have been compiled by a five-year-old with a computer and a box of crayons. The criteria include Alumni Listings in Who's Who in America, weighted at 25%; Student Evaluations from ratemyprofessors.com weighted at 25%; Typical Student Debt at Graduation, weighted at 16 2/3%; Student and Faculty Nationally competitive Awards, weighted at 16 2/3%; and Four-Year Graduation Rates, weighted at another 16 2/3%.

According to The Dartmouth, our low ratings can be attributed to "relatively high levels of student debt and dissatisfaction with teaching quality." First of all: student debt is just a part of life, and we should accept the fact that education comes at a price--I understand that I will owe in excess of twenty grand in student loans upon my graduation. In fact, I can't really see the relevance of student debt in assessing the educational value of an institution. It may be an important life obstacle, but if anything it is a testament to the desirability of our school that we all still choose to come here.

Secondly, the dissatisfaction with teaching quality is a laughable claim given that the most recent data available from the Consortium on Financing Higher Education's survey of the class of 2006 indicates that 96.4 percent of Dartmouth graduates were very satisfied with the quality of instruction at Dartmouth and 97.8 percent were very satisfied with the out-of-class availability of faculty. Yet, in an interview with The Dartmouth, Michael Noer, executive editor of special projects at forbes.com, said that "students did not feel [faculty] were doing as good as a job as [faculty at] some of the competing universities."

Where could Forbes have acquired its data? Apparently the magazine used ratemyprofessors.com to assess the teaching quality of institutions. There are three main reasons why this is a very deeply flawed system of assessment.

First of all, students at Dartmouth, because of our nature as top achievers at our high schools - based on selectivity, SATs, and class rank (all of which are not relevant according to Forbes) - will have higher standards for teaching quality. A Dartmouth student might rank a professor to be of poor quality for something like not knowing an esoteric footnote in history that he or she would assert to have wide reaching and unprecedented ramifications. On the other hand, a student at Principia might rate a professor to be of poor quality if he or she didn't have a bachelor's degree (which is possible at such an institution) or tried to teach a subject without using the Bible.

Second, this variable doesn't take into account the fact that some schools already have internal evaluation systems. This means that the only students who would evaluate professors outside of both the SA Course Guide and the College's Course Review would have to be extremely upset at his or her professor. The fact that ratemyprofessors.com only acknowledges 144 professors at Dartmouth (out of nearly 600) is evidence of this; furthermore, each professor is ranked by usually just one student or three at the most. We simply don't use the system much, and the ones who do are mostly those who are disgruntled, which is obviously a self-selecting and biased variable.

Finally, the structure of ratemyprofessors.com is such that the assessment of professors can be done by the same person an infinite number of times and this same person doesn't even need to ever have had that professor, much less even go to that school. There is no accountability on this website--as proof, I just rated a professor at Nashua. This leaves ratemyprofessors.com, and any credible source's use of it, highly dubious and unscientific.

So there shouldn't be any uproar or any upset banter spent over such a lackadaisical and ill-informed list--who knows, it could even be a joke. Forbes magazine merely needs to read its own article from two weeks prior to reconstruct its own list in a reasonable way. We may all attend the 127th best college in America, but with our eight to one student to faculty ratio (half that of #96 Caroll University), and 15% acceptance rate (as compared to 93% at #116 Carson-Newman College) we're number one earners 10 years out.