Interesting facebook stats...

are available now, thanks to the newest (yes, another) design of facebook. Looking at the networks for U.S. News's Top 28 national universities (why the top 28? Because that's as far as I got), some interesting notes:

• The #1 interest, at every school, is the suitably generic "Music." #2 is almost always "Reading" (understandable exceptions: "Skiing" at Dartmouth; "Movies" at USC).
• As for that music, 25 out of 28 schools had Coldplay #1 in mentions. The Beatles, Radiohead, and Jack Johnson were the most common #2 and #3; some combination of those two popped up almost everywhere.
• In movies, the two most commonly cited movies were Fight Club (#1 at a majority) and Wedding Crashers. As you move down the rankings, Wedding Crashers becomes more prevalent. The only school with a different #1 was Harvard (Love Actually).
• TV provided an interesting pattern. Almost everywhere, the top program was "Family Guy" or "Grey's Anatomy." A top predictor of which was #1 was provided by whether there were more self-identified male or female students. "Family Guy" schools averaged +5 percent male. "Grey's" schools averaged +3 percent female. (One school--Princeton--had "24," then "Family Guy," then "Grey's"; it is +7% male).
  
• And for the readers, "Harry Potter" as a generic category was #1 at all schools. #2 was split between several books, the most common being The Great Gatsby and The Catcher in the Rye, with no discernable pattern showing.
  
• As for self-identification of sex, the top male school was MIT (44%) and the top female school UNC (46%).
• Students at the very top schools tended to be more discreet about their political leanings and relationship status. At the top 10 schools, an average of 57 percent revealed no political affiliation; at the remaining 18, the average was 51 percent. The gap was even more profound for relationship status (52 percent versus 43 percent).
• As for that relationship status, 40-45 percent of those divulging tended to say "single," and at all schools, 32-36 percent of those responding said "in a relationship" (of course, this counts facebook-only relationships). At most of the 28 universities, from 6 to 8 percent of all in-network people stated "married," and from 2-4 percent said "engaged." "It's complicated" almost always netted 2 percent of the network and "in an open relationship" (almost always fake) 1 percent.
• The top school for singles, relative to those responding, was UCLA (52% single), with USC (51%) a close second. The lowest proportion of singles was Harvard (37%).
• Finally, as for political affiliation, on a scale of 5 points for "very liberal" and 1 for "very conservative," and excluding "libertarian," "apathetic," and "other," the top 28 broke down as follows:
• Most liberal: UC-Berkeley (3.85), Yale (3.82), Brown (3.80), Columbia (3.77)
• Most conservative: Notre Dame (3.02), Vanderbilt (3.11), UNC (3.16), UVA (3.40).
  
• Note for Huskies: UW (not one of the 28 included) comes in at 3.48, towards the middle of the ranked schools.
  

You'd think these are a somewhat accurate reflection, despite the inclusion of some alumni.