Fordham students are very familiar with the annual emails from the Rev. Joseph M. McShane, S.J., imploring them to take the U.S. News and World Report and Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education surveys in the interest of the university’s national ranking.

Following our middling ranking by U.S. News & World Report in September, McShane criticized these types of surveys for often using criteria that fails to reflect the university’s true strengths.

McShane is right: no single nationwide survey can properly capture the worth of any given institution. No assessment is perfect. No outside entity has any hope of collecting enough data to get a true idea of Fordham through the eyes of a student.

But have most students responded to McShane’s call? We doubt it.

McShane and Dining Services can send emails until they set their computers on fire and will never persuade a meaningful portion of the Fordham community to contribute to any long-acronymed college survey with no immediate pizza reward.

What compels students to ignore such administrative pleas to play the numbers game with college ranking surveys may not just be laziness alone. It is reasonable to suspect that the Fordham community agrees with McShane once more: these surveys offer a narrow slice of what it means to go to Fordham University, often a cross-section that excludes them entirely.

Good thing we have our own.

Here are The Observer’s rankings of Fordham Lincoln Center, taking into account actual qualities of campus life before arbitrary rankings. We all know it’s not the size of the endowment, but how it is used.