According to the New York Times Baylor University is paying students to retake the SAT's in order to boost their college rankings. Baylor offered incoming freshman students a $300 credit to the campus bookstore to retake the test and a $1,000 merit scholarship if they increase their score by at least 50 points. Apparently, the move increased the schools average score 10 points from 1200 to 1210. The school has no regrets according to John Barry, Vice President of Marketing and Communications:

"Every university wants to have great SAT scores. Every university wants to be perceived as having a high-quality class. We all wanted that. Were we happy our SAT scores went up? Yes. Did our students earn their scores? Yes they did.¿

The main criticism is that they move is a cynical attempt at rasing it's rankings by bribing incoming students. The money is a welcome relief to students book costs or tuition, but an artificial attempt to raise a school's profile. Would you retake the SAT for money? I would.

In the college rankings bonanza, Boeing has decided to rank colleges based on their employees. Boeing will use employee evaluations of it's engineers and other data to see which schools produce the best Boeing employees. It's a novel method of creating rankings, but very engineering and Boeing-centric. Nevertheless, this could pave the way for other companies to rank colleges in a similar manner and also make students expand their college choices.

My prediction: a few surprises in the top-10 along with some mainstays like MIT, Stanford and the like. If you're a prospective college student who's interested in Aerospace Engineering and wants to work for Boeing, the rankings come out within a month.

If you think US News and World Report's college ranking are bogus, now they have the perfect car to go along with those rankings. With the 2009 edition of their rankings coming out this Friday, US News decided to pair certain cars to certain schools.

Going to the liberal bastion that is UC Berkeley? Why not take the new Smart ForTwo (above) for a spin. You'll be the envy of the drum circle.

Or how about a Ford Mustang for #1 party school University of Florida? Ride with the top down as the Mustang's $30,000 sticker price would pay for about two years of college at UF.

I'm not sure we here at FastWeb have scholarships for cars, but we do have 'Why I Deserve a Scholarship' going on now for a chance to win $2,500. That's enough for a decent scooter.