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Occidental No. 2 in Media Buzz

North Carolina's Davidson College topped the list of liberal arts colleges generating media buzz, according to GLM's analysis of data collected from the Internet, social media, the blogosphere, and print and electronic media. Schools were ranked during the last week of December with a mid-year snapshot. The last day of 2009 served as a baseline.

"The TrendTopper MediaBuzz rankings are a way of seeing schools through the eyes of the world at large," GLM said in a press release. "It is a democratic, self-generating ratings system, since it captures the brand equity associated with each of these fine institutions. [Our rankings] remove all bias inherent in each of the other published rankings, since they actually reflect what is being said on the billions of Web pages that we measure."

GLM offered no explanation of what factors may have propelled Davidson and Occidental to the top of the rankings, but the fact that President Barack Obama '83 spent his first two years of college at Occidental and Davidson has a NCAA Division I athletics program -unusual for a liberal arts college - likely played a major role.

Williams, Wesleyan, and Carleton round out the top five in GLM's liberal arts rankings. The University of Madison, Wisconsin topped GLM's university list, with the University of Chicago at No. 2 and Harvard at No. 3. Some other top-ranked universities, including Stanford, Princeton, and UCLA, did not make the Top 10.