From the Christian Science Monitor:

Dozens of schools have recently refused to fill out surveys used to calculate ranks, and efforts are now afoot for a collective boycott.

Colleges have complained in the past about the rankings. But recent events have rallied opposition, including the tying of presidential pay to ranking at Arizona State University and accusations by the president of Sarah Lawrence College that the magazine threatened to use hocus-pocus data to stand in for average SAT scores at the school.

I'd like to see a list of who's boycotting . I'd also like to hear more details from U.S. News, which claims in the article that it will continue the ratings even without the surveys by culling data from other sources.

While I'm basically in favor of screwing the rankings, I take issue with one point made by a pro-boycott administrator:

"This increasing interest in measuring everything – these so-called science-based measures of [educational] outcomes and the like – seems to me to be so misguided that it's now captured the imagination of the leadership in higher education," says Christopher Nelson, president of St. John's College in Annapolis, Md., who heads an association of 124 prestigious liberal arts schools. "This is a bad way of talking about an education. [Students] aren't consumers shopping for a product."

I agree that prospective students aren't like appliance shoppers, but let's not forget that they're paying a lot of money and taking on lots of loans for a service rendered by an organization. It's not a product like a haircut or a Harley, but school is something that can be more or less worth the money, like it or not.