Reprinted from The Gamecock, Friday, April 6, 2005

U.S. News fails to find Carolina's true value
All I really know after 4 years of Gamecock learnin' is I've got a job

By Adam Beam

I sat in the law school auditorium Wednesday night for the Journalism School's awards night. It's the fourth one I've been to and it was just like all the others, except this time I got a plaque instead of a handshake.

During the ceremony, Shirley Staples Carter, the journalism school director, mentioned that USC's program was one of the best in the country. Well, I thought, this is no news to me. Professors, administrators and secretaries are always telling me how great we are. The best is during televised football games when you see USC's commercials. My favorite is the one where a woman is watching sports with some guys and gets bowl-game excited about USC's research initiatives. It was clever.

All of that, however, comes from the source. I get penalized in class if I turn in a news story with only one source, so I'm going to bring in U.S. News and World Report. Maybe they can help me gauge our greatness.

The news magazine says we are just as good as the University of Oregon and Colorado State University, whatever that means. On its list of America's best colleges, considered by many as the gold standard for college rankings, the magazine has us at 117. Clemson, in case you were wondering, is at 74, right up there with Clark University and the University of California at Santa Cruz.

To be on that list, USC has to fill out a form as long as the 2003 USC-Clemson football game (we lost 65-17). Some highlights from that form, which is available on USC's Web site: total money full-time professors spend in a year - $7,102,310. Most popular major - experimental psychology (advertising is second). Percentage of undergraduate men in fraternities - 14 (for undergraduate women in sororities, it's 15). List of four recent, living alumni who are noteworthy in their fields: Mark Bryan, Dean Felber, Darius Rucker, Jim "Soni" Sonefield. Their field? Hootie & the Blowfish, and that's not a joke. So when considering where to rank us, it's good that the staff at U.S. News and World Report knows about Hootie.

That's how U.S. News and World Report ranks colleges, but that's not how I rank them. When I tell people where I go to school, the second question they always ask me after "What's your major?" is "Is the school good?"

I've given this question a lot of thought, and the answer is that I have no idea. I don't know what makes a school good or what makes a school bad. I came to college because newspapers wouldn't hire me out of high school. I applied to four schools, got accepted to all of them and came here because I thought there would be more to write about in a state capital. I leave the rankings to the nerds who care about that stuff.

For most of us, we measure the worth of a college by the jobs we get out of school. If we can't get a job, then obviously the college we went to wasn't worth our money. If we are picking which job to accept, then we sing the praises of our alma mater and donate money after we graduate.

So let the administrators scurry to fill out their forms. Let the public gorge on statistics. All I know is I've had four internships, and I have a job when I leave here. That puts USC at the top of my list.