As we gear up for the finals countdown, the Daily Beast published a list of the top 25 most stressful schools in the country, ranking Georgetown eighth.

Washington University in St. Louis came in first place, followed by University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Harvard, Northwestern, Brown, and Wesleyan.

The gallery also included crime rankings for each school, from data provided by the Department of Education. Georgetown ranks 21st among the top 25 for its crime rates. Wesleyan University ranked first for its crime rates.

Moral of the story? You may be stressed about losing your laptop, but the folks over at Wesleyan are more likely to have theirs stolen.

Take a look at the U.S. News & World Report website today, and you’ll no longer see a ranking number for our neighbors at George Washington University. In previous years at 51st place, now GW is “unranked” on the website, due to their misreported class ranking data of incoming students.

Earlier this month, a disclosure revealed that GW had inflated its high school class standing information for over a decade. The incoming freshmen in the top 10 percent of the class was reported at 78 percent, while the actual after correction was 58 percent. For those freshmen reported to be in the top 25 percent of their high school class, GW reported 95 percent, which was corrected to 90. The total number of students who submitted class rank, according to initial data, was 51 percent, and 38 percent after correction.

According to the U.S. News & World Report update, this false data made GW’s ranking higher than it should be after newer statistics are taken into account. Last week, the President of GW Steven Knapp formally apologized for the data errors and the Provost stated that those who were responsible for the errors would be “held accountable.”

In a statement released today, Knapp expressed surprise at the ranking removal. “We were surprised by the decision of U.S. News to remove George Washington’s numerical ranking rather than to correct it in light of our disclosure,” he said. “We regret the error and have put safeguards in place to prevent such errors from occurring in the future.”

Tired of rankings yet? Georgetown, after failing to break the top 20 in U.S. News rankings yet again, (Go convince Charles Deacon that the CommonApp is not the devil and ask our donors to give a couple billion more to the school) receives another round of beating from the Chronicle of Higher Education’s data. The Chronicle released a study showing how universities view one another, using data submitted by over 1,500 colleges to the U.S Department of Education.

Georgetown now ranks as 63^rd out of 1,595 schools (behind University of Florida), according to their PageRank algorithm. In their interactive pictograph [pictured right], Georgetown selected ten peer colleges; five of which are Ivy League schools. Sadly, our university was jilted by all but three of the schools they selected as peers, although two matches were Ivy Leagues (Dartmouth and Brown). Some schools, like Bowdoin College, selected almost 100 colleges as peers.

Duke and Columbia University did not select any institution as a peer.

On the bright side, we at least have some suitors (24, in fact). Every major Jesuit school chose us as a peer, along with American University and George Washington University. Furthermore, the eight Ivy League schools only picked 12 schools outside their ranks as peers, and Georgetown was one of them, in the company of Stanford, University of Chicago, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We also got some love from Emory (who somehow managed to beat us for the vaunted 20^th place in U.S. News). Seriously, be nicer to Robert Morse, he lives on top of Baked and Wired.

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Today, U.S. News & World Report released its list of college rankings, with Georgetown University as 21st out of National Universities. We’ve seen 22nd place last year, we’ve even gone so far as 23rd in years past. It’s good to be back.

Emory University beat us to the punch, scoring 20th place. BUT WHY? We’ll just stick with tradition and blame it on the author of U.S. News, Robert Morse, who lives directly above Baked and Wired. The minority of hipster Hoyas who frequent this coffee shop probably give our campus a bad rep.

In worse college ranking news, Forbes gave Georgetown an overall placement of 38. Princeton Review recently ranked our students second most politically active among college campuses. The Hilltop scores first place for Princeton Review’s category “College City Gets High Marks,” even though apparently 90 percent of us are supposed to be on campus most of the time and “houses are shaking” when we try to use GUTS buses to leave.

Update: As commenter Toby so astutely pointed out, the Forbes ranking lumps all colleges together, while U.S. News lists us under the “national university” category. If you look at our Forbes ranking as a “research universities,” we’re #19. No so bad…

Yesterday, Forbes magazine released its list of “America’s Top Colleges.”

Georgetown, which ranks #21 on the widely-cited U.S. News and World Report rankings, barely broke Forbes‘ top 50 with a ranking of 47.

At least they didn’t hate us as much as some of the Ivies: Columbia tumbled from #4 in U.S. News to #42 in Forbes; Pennsylvania, from #5 to #52. Top-ranked for the second year in a row is Williams College, a rural, western Massachusetts liberal arts school.

In general, schools that made it to the upper ranks are less expensive, as in tuition-free West Point (#3), or give very generous financial aid, such as #2 Princeton.

Writer Michael Noer asserts that the magazine’s rankings “evaluate the college purchase as a consumer would:  Is it worth spending as much as a quarter of a million dollars for this degree?”

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Iiiiiitttt’s that time again: College ranking season is upon us!

To kick off the 2012 season of ranking our nation’s finest institutions of higher learning, Georgetown is now America’s No. 2 best college town, according to Princeton Review.

Now the prize is really for that collection of townhouses surrounding Thirds and Rhino, but we’ll take credit even though I’m sure CAG is thrilled that Georgetown is considered a college town.

The funniest part? George Washington is #4. Oh what a difference 1.7 miles makes. This just lends weight to my theory that “Density of high-end cupcake bakeries” is one of the contributing factors.

On the flip side, Georgetown University itself holds the No. 2 slot in “Most Politically Active Students,” falling behind only GW. I’m going to venture that the criteria for this doesn’t include “turnout in student government elections.”

Did we at least improve from last year? We were bumped up from tenth and ninth place in the respective categories. Here’s hoping that 2013 sees a “best dorm room drug lab scene” category added to the list.