According to Kaplan via Newsweek via MSNbc, UC Santa Barbara (my alma mater) is one of this year's "twelve hottest colleges".

This information comes to me via the UCSB alumni email newsletter, which I started getting automatically now that they're no longer charging for it.

I like UCSB, but I wish they'd stop with the odd statistics. Every year they call me up (to ask for money) and tell me things like "UCSB is now the number 37 best rated public university". This doesn't really speak to me. I don't know how much information was supplied to Kaplan for their article, but they mention that "27 percent of the students who applied for the class of 2006 had a GPA of 4.0 or higher". What the hell does that tell me about UC Santa Barbara? Okay, so a lot of kids with straight As applied to UCSB. How many actually went there? I wonder.

If you're going to use statistics to make a point, don't attempt to imply something other than what the statistics say. Furthermore, there's nothing wrong with a school that's not at the top of reputation rankings, so what is the obsession with the numbers? What's the difference between number 37 and number 38... and number 90?

How about, "UCSB - It's kinda nice here."?