It really isn’t surprising that Emory University has been a horrible rival. After all, if you’re planning on starting a rivalry where none previously existed, you had better come up with a plan that doesn’t involve piling a few friends into a car, making a nine hour trek from Atlanta to St. Louis, and then graffiti-ing a campus underpass that student groups regularly paint anyway. That said, two recent stories in the Emory Wheel, the school’s student newspaper, should spark interest in anyone who still cares about the rivalry.

The first was a news article about Emory’s recent climb to No. 18 in the U.S. News & World Report college rankings. The article emphasized not placing too much weight on the rankings, but it still pointed out that it had “shrunk the gap between Emory and its peer school in Missouri.”

The second article was about a different set of rankings published by the Washington Monthly magazine. Two years ago, the Washington Monthly decided to produce a new college ranking system where the best schools were the ones that benefit the country. To measure this, the rankings focused their attention on three things: social mobility (how well the school enables “Americans who are poor to become Americans who will prosper”), community service and research. Scoring this was complicated but it involved measuring a variety of things such as the percentage of students with federal student loans and the percentage of students involved in ROTC.

For parents and students who were tired of the U.S. News rankings, this new guide was a godsend. Of the top ten schools in the U.S. News, only two of them broke the top ten of the Washington Monthly. Harvard, which was previously No. 1, tumbled to No. 28. And for anyone who is curious, Wash. U. fell to No. 45.

But Emory’s fall was particularly brutal. Its No. 18 position in the U.S. News rankings did little to stop its drop to No. 96, which makes it slightly better than the University of San Diego but not quite good enough to overtake the University of San Francisco. The magazine pointed out this sudden drop to readers but, rather than offer conciliatory words to Emory, decided that a “Boo, Emory” would suffice.

But what particularly irritated students at Emory was the magazine’s assertion that it “had decided reaching out to poorer students is a low priority.” The school’s reaction was predictable. “According to Washington Monthly, Emory is a hotbed for rich students who contribute little,” wrote the Emory Wheel. “Such tired stereotypes do little more than sell magazines and create controversy.” Perhaps, but it appears that in Emory’s case, this stereotype is at least partially true. The rankings found that only 13 percent of the students at Emory receive Pell grants, which are federal loans for poor college students. That’s not exactly a number to brag about, as the Emory Wheel admits, and it certainly doesn’t indicate that a large number of poor students attend the school.

Yet that’s not what Emory should be worried about. Low economic diversity is a problem, but it’s also eminently fixable just by changing the way students are recruited. What really slammed Emory was the fact that its affluent student body and high SAT scores produced a graduation rate that was, to say the least, unimpressive. The Washington Monthly used the percentage of students with Pell grants, as well as SAT averages, to predict graduation rates. It found that Emory’s expected graduation rate was 87 percent. The actual graduation rate was 66 percent. To put that in perspective, you would find a similar graduation rate at the University of Iowa and other large state schools. But hey, in the spirit of our friendly rivalry (or whatever it’s called these days), here is a piece of advice for Emory, courtesy of Dr. Rebecca Goldin at George Mason University. However inconvenient a fact it may be, it remains true that “world-class scholarship is not always housed in universities committed to social mobility.”

As the Emory Wheel rightly noted, the National Cancer Institute did not recently give the school a $7.5 million grant because of the percentage of its alumni in the Peace Corps. It did so because its scientists have demonstrated a keen ability to find breakthroughs in lung cancer research. Sure, that may not do very much to foster a spirit of national service and community involvement. But it certainly does more public good for the country than almost anything contributed by South Carolina State University (which, for reasons unknown to God himself, managed to scrape out a No. 9 ranking in the Washington Monthly).

Nathan is a junior in Arts & Sciences and a Forum editor. He can be reached via e-mail at forum@studlife.com.

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