Newsweek has a list of the “hottest” colleges just out, and it’s amusing if basically worthless.

Case in point: the magazine lists Cornell as the “hottest Ivy.”

Here’s why:

Unlike the other Ivies, Cornell is a land-grant college emphasizing problem solving as well as scholarly debate. The university boasts a world-class engineering college and top-flight liberal arts, science and fine arts. The hotel school is considered the world’s best. Cornellians, proud of the variety on campus, point to the president, David Skorton, a cardiologist, jazz musician and computer scientist who is the first in his family to have a college education.

Okay, that’s all true, and I’m imagine Wikipedia will confirm it. So what exactly makes Cornell “hot”? Newsweek does not elaborate.

Silly mainstream media. If you’re going to say that something is hot, you should at least say why.

Okay, here’s the Harvard entry:

This was a close one. Harvard rejected 91.03 percent of its applicants to the class of 2011. It seemed likely, once again, to win the trophy for Stingiest Admissions. But wait: Columbia College, part of Columbia University, rejected 91.05 of applicants. Its student newspaper declared it the winner. Some Columbia freshmen, however, attend the School of Engineering and Applied Science or the School of General Studies, which means that only 89.6 percent of applicants felt the pain.

Well, that is a tortured logic, and what the heck is “hottest for rejecting you” supposed to mean anyway?

The comments do a fine job of deconstructing of this particular feature.