For the eighth consecutive year, Princeton ranked first on U.S. News & World Report's list of top universities, which the magazine released last month.
Newsweek and Kaplan, meanwhile, called the University the "Hottest for Liberal Arts" on its "Hottest Universities" list, in which 25 institutions are singled out for excellence in a particular category. Cornell was named "Hottest Ivy."
"In America we are accustomed to wanting number one," said Joanne Levy-Prewitt, a private college counselor and author of "College Bound," a weekly column that runs in the San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers. "That has extended to colleges."
These accolades and media attention emerged the year after 62 college presidents launched an active campaign against U.S. News' "Best Colleges" issue. These schools, all members of the Annapolis Group, promised not to participate in the rankings nor use the rankings in their promotional literature.
Member schools signed a letter arguing that colleges' attempts to influence rankings by raising selectivity and applicants' reliance on the numbers "degrade[s] for students the educational value of the college search process."
The colleges that have left the rankings are mainly smaller liberal arts colleges and universities, including Drew University, Trinity University and Dickinson College.
University Vice President and Secretary Bob Durkee '69 said that "from the beginning of things, we have said that we recognize the rankings as flawed."
He added, "One of the concerns is that people not attach a significance and precision that they don't deserve," noting that rankings have never been used in admission office materials.
Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel, meanwhile, told The Daily Princetonian in 2004 that she "[has] always believed that the U.S. News rankings are of very limited value."
Levy-Prewitt went further. "I think that the college rankings that are currently available completely distort the process," she said. "I think [families] are completely misled."
Longtime Bard College President Leon Botstein has begun encouraging the "beneficiaries" of the rankings system "to end a corrupt and misleading game," telling U.S. News in a letter that he "would sign on to the protest if schools like Harvard [and] Princeton" joined the boycott.
Despite administrators' low opinion of rankings, the University has shown no signs of leaving the high-stakes game that it plays so well.
Upon the release of the U.S. News and Newsweek rankings last month, the University posted a short news item online touting its number-one rank and quoting unnamed "Princeton officials."
"It is not possible for any ranking to capture the distinctiveness of an institution or to determine whether any university is the best choice for a student," one of the anonymous officials said in the statement.
Durkee said that prospective students should look to the materials provided by colleges to evaluate schools to which they might apply.
Colleges, universities and the associations that represent them have been considering alternatives to the current ranking systems, with at least some attention to demands from Congress and the Department of Education for better methods of assessing and comparing institutions of higher education.
"I think that schools will demand that there be a better method of research," said Rob Franek, author of Princeton Review's "The Best 366 Colleges: 2008 Edition."
The steadily growing National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), which asks first and fourth year students about their participation in campus programs and activities, could serve as an additional option. But because institutions must opt to participate in NSSE, it would be difficult to create comprehensive national rankings. Out of thousands of colleges and universities across the country, just 610 institutions — and no Ivies — participated in the spring 2007 survey.
But the University has signed on to join the University and College Accountability Network, an effort by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) to consolidate data on admission and financial aid, common fields of study, campus safety and tuition and fee trends, as well as information about campus life. The site, which is set to go live on Sept. 26, includes data from more than 500 of NAICU's 900 member institutions, including Harvard and Yale.
"The question is always: What are they measuring," Durkee said. "It's always about the components of these rankings."
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