Penn may have come in behind Harvard and Princeton in the coveted U.S. News & World Report college hierarchy, but the University beat out its Ivy League peers in several alternative rankings.
The Sept. 5 issue of Newsweek named Penn the "hottest happy-to-be-there" school in America.
Penn's emphasis on early-decision admissions, the article said, means that the majority of Penn students are eager to matriculate.
"This is increasingly a school people name as a first choice," School of Arts and Sciences Dean Rebecca Bushnell said. "That was a very unscientific article ‹¨« [but] I think it did get at what most of us who have been at Penn for a long time have realized."
Rather than rank hundreds of universities based on criteria like selectivity and students' median SAT scores, the guide named the best schools in categories like "hottest for resort living" and "hottest for rejecting you."
While other Ivy League universities maintain that applying early does not affect an applicant's chances of getting in, Penn Dean of Admissions Lee Stetson said that early-decision candidates are more likely to be accepted to Penn because they have identified the school as their top choice.
"What really counts is the best match" between university and applicant, Stetson said.
Newsweek education writer Jay Mathews -- who wrote the article and chose the school selected in each category -- said he hoped the piece would encourage prospective students to consider more complex attributes when looking at colleges.
I wanted to "open up the eyes of readers -- particularly people who are applying to colleges -- to the hidden magical traits of some schools that they wouldn't have heard of if they had just looked at [other] rankings," Mathews said.
Penn also fared better than most of its Ivy League peers in the September issue of Washington Monthly magazine, which put Penn ninth on the list of American schools that give back to the nation, behind the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pennsylvania State University and Cornell, among others.
"While other guides ask what colleges can do for students, we ask what colleges are doing for the country," the article read.
The Washington Monthly ranked colleges based on criteria like service to the community and whether a university is accessible to low-income students.
"Penn is a place where we are engaged with the rest of the world," Bushnell said. "We really need to do a good job in communicating what is different about a Penn education."
