<p>My thoughts? While it’s always fun to see a favorite college climb in the rankings, it has no real meaning except within groupings. Smith is no different this year than it was last year.</p>
<p>My gut feeling about why Smith went down is that the economic downturn hurt it more than it did some of its peer institutions. As I understand it (and I may be dead-wrong), Smith made some difficult decisions about courses, services, and staff in order to keep supporting financially-disadvantaged students and encouraging future applications from that group.</p>