Dartmouth College was featured as the fifth most wired university in Yahoo Internet Life Magazine's annual "America's Most Wired Colleges" survey this month.
In 1998, at the height of Dartmouth's glory, the College came in first place, but fell to the 26th position last year. This year's ranking mirrors its 1997 ranking of fifth place, in the first survey conducted by Yahoo.
"It's very nice to have been selected, but it's just a poll and we don't do our business based on our rankings," Director of Computing Services Communications Bill Brawley said, adding that his office does not take the poll into account when making any of its decisions.
According to Brawley, the large fluctuations in the College's rank from year to year is due to Yahoo's changes in their ranking methods and increases in the pool of applicants, which this year expanded to all accredited institutions.
Although Dartmouth was considered the most technologically advanced school in the Ivy League, the University of Pennsylvania was the only other Ivy to participate in Yahoo's survey.
According to the magazine, the other Ivies, along with other top institutions such as Stanford and Berkeley, declined to participate because the formula used to determine rankings is kept secret. Another factor is the changes to the number of colleges that are assessed, producing wide swings in the rankings of some colleges from year to year, such as the one Dartmouth experienced.
However, Brawley attributed the non-participation to the controversy that surrounds the survey. Many academic institutions have criticized it for attempting to objectively judge the level of technological advancement, a subjective field, in such widely different campuses.
The article goes on to point out that these schools who had not participated were not included in the top 20 list in 1999 and the author predicted that they would not have been included in the top 100 list this year.
The magazine sent out surveys in January asking about the availability of various technological infrastructure and computing services.
According to its website, Yahoo's rankings were based on four categories: access and infrastructure, administrative services, general resources and student support. Specifically, judges were looking for features like computer ownership requirements, online registration, online course guide, the amount of student web space and computer equipment for the disabled.
The four universities that beat Dartmouth are, in order of rank from first to fourth, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Delaware, New Jersey Institute of Technology and Indiana University of Bloomington.
Williams was named the most wired college.
