Stanford Students Attack"U.S. News” College Rankings

Students at Stanford University want to force U.S. News & World Report out of the college-ranking business.

The students echo the complaints of many in higher education who say the rankings are arbitrary and have more influence than they deserve. Now a new group at Stanford, the"Forget U.S. News Coalition, charges that the university has pandered to the magazine, making changes on campus to improve its ranking. For example, the group says, the university’s new early-decision program is an attempt to improve the university’s ranking by increasing its"yield,” the percentage of accepted students who enroll. Stanford administrators deny the group’s charges.

Nick Thompson, who founded the coalition, says it would like to see Stanford and others follow the example of Reed College in refusing to provide institutional information to the magazine.

The Stanford group has asked for help from students at about 20 other institutions, including this year’s top five in the U.S. News survey: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Duke Universities and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (Stanford was sixth.)"If all these top schools refuse to send in their data, that will discredit U.S. News & World Report, Mr. Thompson says.

Al Sanoff, managing editor of U.S. News, says it is unlikely that the effort will affect the magazine’s annual project. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” he says of the Stanford students’ plan.