August is the time of year when magazines like to type up lists of colleges to help high school seniors figure out if they are applying to “good” schools. Lets see how Skidmore stacks up shall we?

Forbes Magazine places us squarely in 80th place; US News considers us the 41st best liberal arts college in the nation and The Princeton Review kinda likes us also. Skidmore’s place on these lists has been climbing steadily over the past couple of years so make sure to let your friends know you were into Skidmore before it got mainstream.

The whole idea of ranking colleges is…problematic. Not all colleges are equal, yes, but the idea that any organization or individual is able to definitively say that one school is #1 and another school is #6 requires a certain hubris. The whole methodology is suspect, the list’s intentions are usually confusing and mostly rooted in selling magazines, and they tend to be pretty lame and surface level analyses of actual student life. But still, these rankings do hold a particular sway over our perception of higher education and offer a convenient opportunity to self-congratulate. Skidmore, all things considered, usually does fairly well in these rankings but the College is careful how they spin it—tour guides, for example, are eager to let you know we have “dorms like palaces” but rarely tout our supposed “reefer madness.” In the end, the college is a business–a luxury brand—and these rankings, at their most benign, are just another advertisement.