U.S. colleges find magazine rankings too useful to give up easily

You may recall the kerfuffle a while ago when a number of Canadian universities decided to boycott the Maclean's university rankings as being unfair and misleading.

The Maclean's rankings were modelled on similar U.S. News and World Report university rankings. Some U.S. colleges wanted to boycott those, too. But, according to a story in Folio:, it's uphill work. More than 60 universities signed a protest letter, agreeing not to use the rankings in their marketing materials. Some of those went ahead and used the data anyway on their web sites.

According to the AP, at least four [of the] colleges... use some form of the ranking on their Web sites. Wesleyan brags it is “consistently ranked as one of country’s Best Colleges by U.S. News & World Report.” Birmingham-Southern notes that it “has been ranked among the top National Liberal Arts Colleges in the country by U.S. News.”

The marketability of a top spot on U.S. News’ list appears to be too tempting for schools to ignore.

None of the top 30 liberal arts colleges included in last year’s issue have signed the letter, nor have any of the top 100 universities.

“To end a corrupt and misleading game, the winners, not the losers, have to call it quits,” Bard College president Leon Botstein wrote in a letter to the magazine.