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)