• Rich Barlow

    Senior Writer

    Photo: Headshot of Rich Barlow, an older white man with dark grey hair and wearing a grey shirt and grey-blue blazer, smiles and poses in front of a dark grey backdrop.

    Rich Barlow is a senior writer at BU Today and Bostonia magazine. Perhaps the only native of Trenton, N.J., who will volunteer his birthplace without police interrogation, he graduated from Dartmouth College, spent 20 years as a small-town newspaper reporter, and is a former Boston Globe religion columnist, book reviewer, and occasional op-ed contributor. Profile

Comments & Discussion

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There are 11 comments on BU Is World’s 32nd-Best University, Says U.S. News

  1. Good positional ranking for BU and one that I actually agree with.
    I never have understood why BU ranks to horribly in the US News National Ranking report.

  2. It is always great when the president and provost of a university attribute all their success to themselves and their fellow faculty members without even mentioning the students once.
    In the end, without great students, no university will move up in the rankings this quickly.

    1. The US News and World Report article provides a link to the methodology used in this ranking. If you review it closely, it is almost entirely based on Faculty activities (research, citations, Conferences, and so on…) Only item even remotely related to student body seems to be the number of PhD’s produced, but even there they look at how many Ph.D’s per faculty. There is also something like reputation factor so this may have something to do with student body, I didn’t look that closely.

      You may not entirely agree with their methodology but it doesn’t seem to place much, if any, emphasis on students.

    2. I find it frustrating that they don’t mention the students as well. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had some amazing, knowledgable professors here- but to be honest, not all of them are that way. For example, this semester I have a professor who outright told us she has tenure, and finds it ok to claim she’s “sick” or “at a conference” at least once every two weeks thus far. I really could go on about the amount of careless or uninformed professors I’ve had here. Last semester I had a psychology professor who continuously told us incorrect information and the TA had to clarify in every discussion. In sum, I feel like professors at BU have this reputation for being so well informed and interesting, yet when you actually sit in class with them, you will find that half the time they are just boring, incorrect, or careless.

  3. Can someone explain to me how BU can be 32 in the ranking for best global universities but 41 in top US universities? Where did those extra 9 come from? Furthermore, what about non-US universities in the first category?

    In my head, it should be a lot harder to get high ranks when looking at all universities than just those in the US.

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