Thanks to one of our assistant content directors, Matt Siracusa, this year’s STACK Elite 50 College Rankings is beginning to take shape. Siracusa just got done plugging in the numbers for the STACK Factor and 2010 U.S. News & World Report on America’s Best Colleges portions of our rankings. We have to tip our cap to Mr. Siracusa for spending two full work days staring at excel files and making sure he was inputting the correct numbers into microscopic cells. Nobody wants this job, but he graciously accepted and got it done.

I will now spend the next day or so scrolling and squinting through his work, fact-checking every number he plugged in. It’s essential that numerous specs check all of our numbers to ensure 100 percent accuracy. After looking at a screen for hours on end, you can’t blame us for being a little cross-eyed. Not an ideal work day here at STACK, but someone has to do it.

To refresh your memory (and mine), the STACK Factor evaluates the strength of each school’s athletic community in terms of the level of athletic support and prowess throughout all 21 varsity sports covered in the rankings. The score is based largely on the number of a school’s sports teams that finished in the top 25 nationally.

Each year, U.S. News & World Report ranks the nation’s top colleges and universities strictly in terms of academic prowess. The publication uses a detailed formula that takes into account, among other factors, college entrance exam scores, acceptance, retention and graduation rates, education expenditures (e.g., funds dedicated to research) and faculty resources (e.g., student-to-teacher ratios). We use each school’s U.S. News & World Report ranking as one of the main academic factors in our calculations.

Without mentioning any names, I can inform you that we have a new school atop our STACK Factor rankings (replacing Stanford from last year by one sport). That school is off to a promising start, considering that Stanford ended up being our overall number one school last year.

Check back next Wednesday to get the latest development in the STACK Elite 50 College Rankings soap opera.

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