CORRECTION APPENDED

Harvard placed second among national universities in the 2008 US News & World Report rankings—below Princeton and above Yale for the second year in a row.

Harvard has consistently placed within the top few slots and has chosen to continue to participate in the rankings, which boast a readership of about two million, despite growing opposition among some college presidents, especially at liberal arts colleges.

The report bases its rankings on seven categories, broadly defined as peer assessment (between institutions), graduation and retention rate, faculty resources, student selectivity, financial resources, alumni giving, and graduation rate performance.

Harvard came out at the top this year for the Best Value ranking—which rates schools based on how much a student is expected to get out of their education for the money they pay—passing the California Institute of Technology, which held the top spot last year but dropped to fourth for the 2008 list.

Princeton ranked second in the category this year and Yale third.

This rating is based on a combination of three factors: the ratio of quality to price with quality defined by the other set of rankings, the percentage of students receiving need-based scholarships, and the average discount given to students. In the spring of last year, Harvard announced that families earning less than $60,000 a year would no longer be expected to pay for their children to attend Harvard, and that the contributions of families with annual incomes between $60,000 and $80,000 would be reduced.

'JOINING THE REBELLION'

But the US News & World Report rankings—which have been published since 1983—have drawn ire from a number of sources.

In May, twelve college presidents signed a letter asking their colleagues not to participate in the peer assessment survey and not to use the rankings for promotional efforts. The letter, which has since gathered over 50 additional signatories including the presidents of Wesleyan University, Kenyon College, and Trinity College in Connecticut, called the rankings "misleading" and criticized them for implying a false precision, obscuring important differences, ignoring what students are actually learning, and encouraging wasteful spending in pursuit of improved rankings. [SEE CORRECTION BELOW]

In June, members of the Annapolis group, an association of liberal arts colleges, decided to develop an alternate format to present information about colleges to students in the college search process.

"More schools are joining the rebellion against the rankings because more people are realizing that the rankings are a ridiculous sham that wastes colleges' money and resources," Alexandra Robbins, author of "The Overachievers: The Secret Life of Driven Kids" wrote in an e-mail.

Robbins wrote that the increase in the number of applicants means that colleges can afford the rankings drop if they opt out.

Nonetheless, none of the Ivy League presidents signed the letter, and according to a recently released survey by Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions of over 300 college admissions officers, 97 percent of those schools that participated in the rankings last year plan to do so again.

A spokeswoman for US News & World Report, Cynthia Powell, said that the ranking system provides an "objective, fair, balanced" third party perspective on colleges based on facts and statistics drawn from "a group of industry standards of academic excellence."

"We definitely take our critics really seriously—our goal is to put out the best product we can," she said. "Our belief—and our readers have certainly shown us that they agree—more information is better."

Dean of Admissions William R. Fitzsimmons ’67 voiced similar sentiments, saying that while the admissions office does not comment on any specific surveys, this one and others like it provide useful information to students in the college search in a way that was not possible 30 or 40 years ago.

“The media has frankly democratized the information available about colleges—in the previous generation and especially in the generation before that—info about that was very scarce and frankly not widely available,” he said.

And research suggests that the rankings do have an impact on students' college choices.

A 1999 study of statistical trends of 30 institutions—not including Harvard—over 11 years found significant differences in such factors as application numbers, admit rate, and yield when a school’s rankings changed even as much as one place. For example, the study showed that an increase by one ranking could make an admit rate decrease by 0.399 percent and a yield increase by 0.171 percent.

But Harvard consistently finds itself in the top few slots in these rankings, and variations within these positions do not seem to affect applicant numbers, or admit and yield rates.

Fitzsimmons said that while students and families may consider a number of different pieces of information when making a college decision, the deciding factor is likely not a number or statistic.

“The main criterion would be the whether an institution is the right match,” he said.

One high school senior, Andrew Shum, said that while some students in the throes of the college search focus on creating a match, their parents seem more focused on schools' rankings.

"My parents were asking why I prefer MIT over all the other colleges, even though it has been ranking lower than those schools," said Shum, a senior from New Jersey who says he plans to apply to several of the highest ranking schools. "I told them that [the list] gives a good sense of where to get a good education in the United States, but you have to make the ultimate decisions based on your own criterion and judgments." Shum added that one draw for him is MIT's hacking culture, which he says is "something that a list can't take into account—you can’t quantify that."

PRINCETON REVIEW

Harvard also ranked high in several categories of the Princeton Review's Best 366 College Rankings, released on Monday. The Princeton Review uses student input to rate their experiences in 62 categories—ranging from academics to demographics to quality of life.

Harvard came in as the hardest college to get into—with an admit rate last year of slightly under 9 percent—and as the school with the best college library. It was also featured on the list of Best Northeastern Colleges, Colleges With a Conscience, and America's Best Value College. The College also came in top ten for best college newspaper and most politically active students and top twenty for dorm quality and how studious students tend to be.

—Staff writer Aditi Balakrishna can be reached at balakris@fas.harvard.edu.

CORRECTION: The Aug. 25 online article "Harvard Places Second in College Rankings" incorrectly stated that the president of Wesleyan University had signed a letter asking colleagues to refrain from participating in the US News and World Report higher education survey. In fact, the presidents of Wesleyan College and Ohio Wesleyan University signed the letter, but the president of Wesleyan University did not.