The Revolution of 1776 started on the East Coast, but the ranking Revolt of 1996 began on the West Coast. A Stanford-led coalition of students protested the concept that colleges can be ranked at all.

The students made a concerted effort to convince colleges to with-hold information from U.S. News until the magazine either abandoned its ranking system or changed the system to present the top schools in a non-ordered list.

The coalition succeeded in convincing student representatives from six of the colleges in the Ivy League to encourage their schools to withhold information. Brown's abstained from the vote, and Harvard's rejected the motion because of problems with the bill's wording, according to Undergraduate Council representative Olivia Verma '00.

Rudenstine was sympathetic to the coalition and in an October interview praised a letter written by the Stanford president condemning the rankings in an interview in late October.

"The idea that you could develop a calculus to make any sense out of all the differences between colleges is not a very helpful or promising enterprise," said Rudenstine, who pointed out the absurdity of ranking jumps of 10 to 15 spots by some colleges this year.

Yet the U.S. News ranking was not the only judgment that Harvard deemed absurd.

When an April survey by the Yahoo! Internet search engine ranked colleges on effective use of the Internet for educational purposes, it put Harvard 64th out of 100 schools. Yale and Princeton were once again placed above Harvard. Princeton finished 12th and Yale finished 60th [opponents of rankings complained that the methodology for compiling data was not rigorous].

Nevertheless, looking at those students accepted to both Harvard and Yale, a remarkable majority still chose to come to Harvard. Last year, when Harvard was ranked first, 87 percent of these students opted for Harvard. This year, even after Harvard was ranked third, the figure was still 87 percent, showing that Harvard's allure remains supreme.

"When you're America's oldest and richest university and your yield is higher than the other schools and your reputation is world-wide, this [ranking drop] doesn't affect Harvard really one way or another," Elfin said.