How well colleges mix academics and athletics
Came across this BuzzFeed graphic earlier this morning.
It attempts to look at how well colleges stack up both athletically and academically. (You can see the chart and its Top 10 schools here on BuzzFeed.com.)
The academic rankings it uses come from Forbes, which uses the following mix of factors (as quoted from its site):
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The rankings are based on five general categories: post graduate success (32.5%), which evaluates alumni pay and prominence, student satisfaction (27.5%), which includes professor evaluations and freshman to sophomore year retention rates, debt (17.5%), which penalizes schools for high student debt loads and default rates, four-year graduation rate (11.25%) and competitive awards (11.25%), which rewards schools whose students win prestigious scholarships and fellowships like the Rhodes, the Marshall and the Fulbright or go on to earn a Ph.D.
As a result, it has my alma mater, the University of Georgia, academically ahead of the University of Minnesota, which I find ... strange.
(You can see the Minnesota academic rankings here. You'll have to click on the tabs at the bottom of the page to travel further down the list.)
We all know to take rankings with a big grain of salt. Consider this just for kicks -- or just a warning of what's out there.