UT Ranking Has Sixth Street Smiling, Parents Puzzled

The kids returning to UT Austin have something extra special to brag about this year: the university was just named the country's number one party school in a survey of 115,000 college students conducted by the Princeton Review, beating the likes of Penn State University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and (snicker) Brigham Young University.

In addition to dominating the overall list, Longhorn students were ranked:

• 2nd in the "use of hard liquor"
  
• 3rd in beer drinking, and
  
• 13th in marijuana smoking

According to the AP news article, UT was quick to publicly dismiss the rankings, seeing as how such doobie-us accolades (sorry) tend to be viewed by some as being inversely proportional to an institution's academic qualities:

UT spokesman Don Hale said campus leaders don't take such rankings very seriously.

"I know there were a lot of good parties here after we won the national football championship, and I'm going to guess that a lot of the kids who filled out the survey remembered those parties," he said.

Oddly enough, the rankings published in Princeton Review's "Best 361 Colleges" guide -- in stores tomorrow -- are pretty off from similar rankings published earlier this year in US News and World Report's "America's Best Colleges." UT Austin ranked a paltry 47th place on that list, tied with four other schools.

The full list of honorees:

• Best Professors - Middlebury College (Middlebury VT)
  
• Most Beautiful Campus - Pepperdine Univ. (Malibu CA)
  
• Happiest Students - Brown Univ. (Providence RI)
  
• Most Liberal Students - Warren Wilson College (Asheville NC)
  
• Most Conservative Students - Hillsdale College (Hillsdale MI)
  
• Toughest College to Get Into - Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (Cambridge MA)
  
• Frat & Sorority Scene Biggest - DePauw Univ. (Greencastle IN)
  
• Top Party School - Univ. of Texas (Austin TX)
  
• Top Stone-Cold Sober School - Brigham Young Univ. (Provo UT)
  
• Most Religious Students - Brigham Young Univ. (Provo UT)
  
• Race / Class Relations Friendliest - Rice Univ. (Houston TX)
  
• Most Diverse Student Body - DePaul Univ. (Chicago IL)
  
• Gay Community Most Accepted - New York Univ. (New York NY)
  
• Students Pack the Stadiums for their Teams - Univ. of Notre Dame (Notre Dame IN)
  
• Best College Library - Harvard College (Cambridge MA)
  
• Best College Newspaper - Yale Univ. (New Haven CT)

Photo entitled "Jones Soda: Brussels Sprout with Prosciutto" by Travis Kiger on flickr