Yesterday evening's quiet release of the influential but controversial U.S. News and World Report America's Best Colleges rankings revealed that Penn has taken another step toward the top, inching up one spot to a five-way tie for fourth place.
For a university once relegated to the Ivy basement in the rankings and only a recent entry into the list's top 10, this is quite an achievement. As it now stands, Penn shares a pedestal with M.I.T., Stanford, Duke and Caltech, chasing only Harvard, Princeton and Yale.
And though the top 10 has barely changed from last year -- the three No. 5 schools last year are joined this year at fourth by last year's four and eight -- the jump indicates that Penn is at the very least holding its ground in rarified territory that scarcely seemed within its grasp only a decade ago.
Many, including most administrators at this university, would dismiss these rankings as inaccurate -- a foolish attempt to quantify the many unique qualities each school possesses. But silly as they may be, the rankings are extraordinarily important when it comes to recruiting a top-flight applicant pool and do, in fact, represent the many positive trends seen at Penn in the last few years.
The Political Science Department, a long-running joke on campus just four years ago, has made a remarkable turnaround with a series of crucially important and high-profile faculty hires. And while no other single academic unit has seen a change as dramatic as the one in Stiteler Hall, the quality of the faculty today is significantly stronger than it was in 1999.
Penn's national profile is also on the rise, capped by John DiIulio's stint at the White House in 2001. And the University is increasingly seen as a "hot" school, a fact no doubt aided immeasurably by the kindness of the editors at U.S. News.
The rankings' validity can be questioned, but their almost exclusively positive effects on this institution cannot be.
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