A rankings revolt

San Francisco Chronicle 3/13/07

In the college hunt, U.S. News and World Report has a tidy franchise publishing annual campus rankings. Parents and students want a quick set of choices, and colleges look for a top listing to fatten applicant lists and boost their images.

What if a campus won't play this highly subjective game? Sarah Lawrence College, a small liberal-arts school outside New York City, is defying the magazine by refusing to supply SAT scores from applicants, an ingredient the magazine uses in judging campuses. The college has met with a draconian response from the publication: Produce the SAT numbers or we may make up our own, and deduct points while we're at it.

It's a small, but telling battle. Almost since the day the U. S. News ratings began some 20 years ago, campus leaders have grumbled about fairness. Big schools with lots of eager applicants fear nothing. The rest worry that ratings are educated guesswork, though few can risk being left out of the popular review that sells hundreds of thousands of copies each year.

Sarah Lawrence is right to break with this hypocritical game. It has every right to measure its students its own way. That's a ratings system that adds up.