With another year of rankings from The Princeton Review comes another conversation — among an already growing slew of them — about how UT measures up against other public universities in the nation.
On the grandest scales, the results were good for the university. UT found itself once again among the best colleges, placing it among the top 15 percent in the nation. In addition, UT is called a best value college once again, making it one of the top 50 best buys among public universities in the nation.
But when one looks a bit more closely at UT’s two-page profile in The Princeton Review’s latest “Best 373 Colleges” publication, the evaluation is not quite as glowing.
Perhaps most damning is students’ analysis of professors. It essentially amounts to students saying that “some professors are good, and some professors are bad,” and one could make the case that any university — especially a public state one — might have the same middleground opinion of professors among its student body.
But some of the vicious tones that are applied in the sample quotes take a reader aback. You can hear the bitterness in the students’ voice when reading about how one student had professors they loved and some they wish they could fire. Another student sarcastically offered that a UT student needs to make sure everything is in writing in order to avoid the Big Orange Screw.
It’s also strange that the university administration — which is usually either vilified for tuition hikes or looked upon as objects of scandal in the past because of abrupt departures or public arguments — is only mentioned in passing as people that “genuinely try to connect” to students. It shows just how effective the all-cards-on-the-table approach that Interim President Jan Simek and Chancellor Jimmy Cheek have employed has perhaps improved the public image of the university’s top officials in recent years.
Not nearly as concerning but perhaps equally as depressing is how the students themselves at UT are characterized in The Princeton Review’s summary of student responses to their survey. A prospective student sees a stereotype: a football-crazed, middle-class conservative who brings “at least one North Face jacket, a pair of Sperry shoes and plenty of Ralph Lauren clothes” to campus. As those words are typed, I can hear the collective groan from thousands on campus.
One student even says, “Walking to class, it is a wave of the exact same person in the exact same clothes just in a different color combination.” To those students who responded this way, that cannot be the way our student body really is? Can it? I certainly hope not, but I will avoid doing a verbal survey through the Fort on a Saturday night to verify.
The summary of the student body at UT also mentions other groups at UT such as “artistic types, liberal crunchy types,” but the stereotypical caricature already did the damage.
And, as in the past, UT is categorized as a “party school,” always a ranking that students should be proud of. Reading about UT students’ likelihood of drinking on the weekend in a resource like The Princeton Review just makes one wonder: Is this sort of fact the kind that really attracts students to the university, or does it merely repel them? How much does it play into what we call university life?
Administration tend to make light of rankings like The Princeton Review, while also taking them into vital consideration. It’s a logical stance that does not altogether make sense.
But whether or not you are dismayed with the results of The Princeton Review’s survey, there’s no doubt about it: The two-page summary of how UT students think about UT is one of the most compelling reads from any of the multitude of rankings and studies that are done about what UT life really is like.
And the way The Princeton Review does the survey seems to strive for accuracy. The staff gathers a representative sample, reading through all the responses and looking for a consensus of what the student body really thinks. It’s better to see it in writing and with, admittedly inflammatory, quotes from select students than it is to see simply quantifiable data.
Plus it’s always great to hear that “student publications are popular” at UT, as The Princeton Review tells us.

— Robby O’Daniel is a graduate student in communication and information. He can be reached at rodaniel@utk.edu.