Yahoo for MIT!
The magazine Yahoo! Internet Life ranked MIT No. 1 among the nation's most wired colleges in its May issue. (As Casey Stengel used to say, you can look it up--on the Web, of course, at ).
Yale was rated 60th, Harvard 64th and Stanford 84th.
The magazine rated 300 nationally ranked four-year universities that are listed regularly in college guides and national rankings. The survey addressed 35 factors divided into four categories: student services, hardware and wiring, academics and social possibilities. Academics accounted for 45 percent of the final ranking, with hardware/wiring and social use joined to provide another 45 percent. The remaining 10 percent was based on student services.
MIT topped the rankings, with 80 percent of the students owning their own computers, a port for every resident student, unlimited Web access, automatic e-mail accounts, student server space for home pages, access to libraries, on-line homework, and registration and access to chats, games and dates.
Northwestern University, Emerson College, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Dartmouth rounded out the top five, in that order.
Emerson over Stanford, Harvard and Yale? Here's what the magazine said: "Emerson reported great student services, a solid infrastructure with a particularly high rate of student computer ownership (90 percent), and a lot of social Net use--but its high rate of Net use in academics really put this small, liberal arts school over the top. Seventy percent of courses were reported to use Web resources in teaching, and more than half have a home page and/or allow students to submit homework and get class notes online."
Reacting to its high ranking, Emerson bragged, "We pride ourselves on being the most wired school in Boston." Boston University, Boston College and Northeastern did not make the top 100.
The magazine saluted MIT for holding themed MUD (multi user domain) sessions.
Surfing the rankings, one finds:
��������������������������� Columbia is the only unranked Ivy League school. Princeton was 12th, Penn 27th, Brown 43rd and Cornell 50th.
��������������������������� Among other elite schools, the University of California at Berkeley was 16th, Caltech was 25th and the University of Chicago was 72nd.
��������������������������� Other New England rankings: Middlebury, ninth; Colby, 11th; University of Connecticut, 17th; Holy Cross, 22d; Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 28th; Wellesley College, 51st; Connecticut College, 52d; Tufts University, 54th; Smith College, 74th: Amherst College, 80th; Williams College, 81st; Rhode Island School of Design, 89th; Wesleyan University, 96th.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on April 30, 1997.
