Anyways, eating in the dining commons at my school was my least favorite option and I imagined it to be the same for every campus, until I came across an article on Yahoo about the Top 20 Rankings for Best College Food and became insanely jealous of these delicious treats.

At Wheaton College, ranked number one in this survey, Klaud Mandl, the General Manager of Food Services at Wheaton, who previously worked at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston, has a menu of Belgian chocolate homemade truffles, lavender-infused pork chops with onion gravy, and cumin-lime baked chicken with avocado cream sauce. Are you serious?!?! Homemade Belgian truffles??? The closest thing we got to that at my school was a help-yourself ice cream machine with watered down frozen yogurt.

These dishes at Wheaton are created by “The Wheaton Cuisine Team,” a group of students who represent the student body and come up with ideas, new recipes and fun ways to create a staff-student partnership with the dining commons. The Yahoo article goes on to report that the New York Times recently did a story on this topic, saying “as palates grow more sophisticated and admissions become more competitive, many top colleges are paying attention to dining rooms as well as classrooms.” Nifty. Who would have thought that food is becoming as high a demand as academic?

Is this true? Well, it sure wasn’t at my school. From the burnt burgers to the sticky, over cooked pasta, there sure wasn’t any “Cuisine Team” and there definitely were no chocolate truffles (although, that may have added to the freshman 15!).

Here are the Top 20 schools for 2009…is your school on here? If so, please dish about the uber delicious foods you are chowing down on, while I stick with my daily diet of Lucky Charms cereal.

1. Wheaton College (IL), Wheaton, IL

2. Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME

3. Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA

4. St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN

5. James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA

6. Colby College, Waterville, ME

7. Franklin W. Olin Col. of Engineering Needham, MA

8. Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO

9. University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN

10. Gustavus Adolphus College, Saint Peter, MN

11. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

12. University of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA

13. Scripps College, Claremont, CA

14. Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT

15. Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, CA

16. Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA

17. Miami University (OH), Oxford, OH

18. College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor, ME

19. Bates College, Lewiston, ME

20. University of Georgia, Athens, GA

[photo by JFKlibrary.org]

Even safety schools are getting more selective. Miami University in Oxford, Ohio saw a record number of applicants this year, only admitting 73% of them, down from 78% last year. First of all, why the hell is there a Miami University in Ohio to begin with, let alone one that rejects people? Has the world gone mad?This whole thing is getting out of hand. Not only obscure schools are getting more applicants, elite colleges also received a record numbers.

Dartmouth College, a place near and dear to my heart, had a record number of applicants 14,176 and only accepted 2,165—its lowest acceptance rate in history. This means I’m going to be bombarded with a freshman class full of whiz kids when I come back in the fall. Do you know how annoying those kids are in class? It’s tragic. I hope these perfect academic specimens won’t waste their Wednesday nights studying instead of playing beer pong…

What’s the deal with this whole rise in applications thing anyway?

1. More kids are graduating from high school instead of dropping out, making babies, and getting swank fast-food and construction jobs

2. There are more international students and college recruiters have even started going abroad to promote their colleges. These kids are crazy smart.

3. Remember the Common Application? That genius piece of paperwork that let you fill out one application and sent it to all the school on your list. Well you fools have been filing 10, 15, even 20 applications sending the numbers through the roof. I know, it’s not your fault. I would have done it too if I hadn’t applied early.

So what’s a girl to when faced with odds like this?

Start looking at schools earlier, be realistic about your odds, and most importantly don’t be too heart-broken if you don’t get someplace like Princeton because chances are most people didn’t get in either. And if you think about it, how much fun would it be to go to school with kids who have been padding their resumes since they were out of the womb? College rocks, don’t stress too much about were you get in.