<p>The following are passages from "Harvard Schmarvard" by Jay Mathews.</p>
<p>"Before the US News rankings began, applicants had to rely on rumor, intuition, their own inexact comparisons of the numbers they found in the existing college guides, and their high school counselor's judgment in determining which colleges offered the most. Not only did the magazine dare to rank schools, but it also forced colleges to begin presenting data on SAT averages, faculty backgrounds, and admissions decisions in a consistent way or be left off the US News list altogether. The magazine acknowledged that it could not quantify every factor that made a good school. It had trouble finding measures of the quality of learning and campus life once students enrolled. But it made some progress - forcing colleges to compile and release the percent of their students who graduated in six years, a useful indicator of a university's commitment to ensuring each student's success."</p>
<p>However, some educators would soon respond that the list was "not sensible consumerism, but callous disregard of the unique character of American education." </p>
<p>"Historically, Stanford had tried to ignore the US News list." In 1983, "the list's first year, when Stanford was listed number one among undergraduate instititutions", the Stanford college president "called the magazine rankings a 'beauty contest.' He said that it did not have much significance. But by 1996, the university had slipped to number 6, and" the college "cared about the rankings and wanted to fix it." </p>
<p>The president of Stanford said "The rankings are arbitary and absurdly counter-intuitive in their yearly variance. Can a stable university like Johns Hopkins really change from being the 21st best school in the nation to the 10th and then back to 15th in a three year period?"</p>
<p>"The very selective schools that dominate the list were considered the best schools in the country before the list existed. They will remain so as long as they say no to the vast majority of their applicants." The president of UMCP said "Your reputation is set by whom you reject, not whom you accept." and "The more you reject, the better your reputation." "It is a self-fulfiling prophecy. The more students who are excluded from the freshman class, the higher will be that class's average SAT scores, yield, and several other factors that influence the US News rankings."</p>
<p>"I think the wisest students and their parents already know what to do with the list. They glance at the rankings each year, note the statistics about the schools that interest them, read the usually well-nuanced articles that accompany the lists, and go back to making their own plans."</p>