Dammit. Another year, another failure. Caltech still can’t get it right. Princeton gets #1, but not us? Those slimy east-coast know-it-alls sure are giving us a run for our money. We’ve really let it slip this time. I mean, just look at this graph.
This defeat, it hurts. I’m not even sure what school this is that I matriculated to anymore. Like many Caltech undergraduates, I decided to attend Caltech because it was once ranked first by the Times Higher Education. Now that we’ve lost that, who even cares about our top-notch research and focus on the sciences? Every school can claim to have that, but only one school can be number one.
Great, now Page House might have to paint over their mural that famously says “Thank You for not Sucking”
We shouldn’t give up just yet. I’m not a pessimist; we’ll definitely show them. After all, we’re “Ca1tech”. It’s in the very name. Princeton doesn’t even have an ‘L’ in their name to turn into a 1. The very alphabet is on our side.
But what have we been doing wrong? I’ll tell you. It’s all in the ranking methodology. Caltech doesn’t graduate enough people. Our gender ratio also isn’t as equal as theirs. How do we fix that? Easy. Automatic graduation for everyone. Automatic admission for females. Done and done.
There are other factors, but we easily have the means to fix those too. Not enough citations? We’ll cite our own papers. Each Caltech professor will be required to cite at least 20 Caltech papers with each publication. Our peer reputation score is too low? We can get us a couple thousand high-quality peer assessment survey results. Don’t worry, I know a guy.
But if we’re seriously in this to win, we might as well give it our all. We’ll start over completely. Bulldoze campus and replace it with an exact replica of Princeton. We’ll rename the institute to “PrincetOn” (that’s with a cyrillic “o” so we can avoid trademark issues). We’ll fire all the current faculty and hire researchers that will conduct exactly the same research that Princeton does. We’ll poach their kitchen staff and serve the same food Princeton does, and we’ll ship air over from New Jersey so that we can breathe the same smog they do. This is how we can be sure to maximize the same criteria that let Princeton win. And throw in the California weather as a tie breaker, and we’ll certain win every year.
Wait, the rankings were from the Princeton Review? Hell, it should have been obvious to me all this time. Those biased, bone-headed bozos must be inflating their own score. Just the kind of dirty tactics I’d expect from the school that stole Einstein from us! We need to fight back. Maybe I’ll publish the “Caltech Review”, and use proven methodologies to find out who the best school *really* is. It’ll look like this:
Best School Rankings, 2016
- Ca1tech
- Everyone Else
- Princeton
Yeah, that’s right. It’ll be just that simple. Every. Single. Year. We’ll teach them how it feels to methodically and accurately know you suck!
