After years of being blamed for colleges' feverish and sometimes rushed competition to sign up their best applicants, the editors of U.S. News & World Report have decided to stop counting the success of such campaigns in their influential "America's Best Colleges" rankings.

U.S. News Executive Editor Brian Kelly said the new rankings, due in early September, will no longer include a measure called "yield" -- the percentage of students who accept each college's offers of admission. Given the power of the U.S. News ratings, which have led some parents to refuse even to visit low-ranked schools, college admissions experts say the decision may have an significant effect on the debate over programs that require students to attend colleges that accept them before Christmas of their senior years.

Some educators and students say that these Early Decision programs, popular with the most selective colleges, force high schoolers to pick their first choice school before they have had time to consider all the options and put minority students at a disadvantage. Yale President Richard Levin has led a campaign to discard such programs, but so far not many schools have followed. Educators have also complained that the emphasis on yield has turned otherwise honorable college administrators into hucksters each April, as they throw big weekend parties for the students they have admitted in hopes they will attend that school rather than one of its competitors.

Charles Deacon, dean of admissions at Georgetown University, has called this "the mania for yield." Experts say schools that persuade most of their admitted students to attend -- Harvard leads the nation with a yield of about 80 percent -- are like crowded upscale restaurants. The fact that so many customers want to go there makes them even more desirable.

Since yield "seems to be a figure that schools have tried to manipulate -- to the detriment of students, but not, in fact, to the true benefit of their rankings -- we figured we might as well just drop it," said Sara Sklaroff, U.S. News education and culture editor. She said that view was buttressed by an analysis that showed eliminating yield would have little effect.

Many college administrators, however, say that yield is a useful benchmark and statistical tool that they will not discard no matter what U.S. News does. "Yield represents who really wants you and those places with high yields should be commended," said W. Kent Barnds, dean of admissions and enrollment management at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. "Additionally, I believe that a high yield represents that a college or university has admitted the 'right' kids -- those who are admissible and want to attend to."

Barnds said his school does not use early acceptance programs but has a yield of about 29 percent, "which is the strategic figure that we use in determining how many offers to make from our applicant pool."