Recently, the U.S. News and World Report magazine released its annual college rankings list, titled “America’s Best Colleges.” As always, the rankings elicit plenty of national attention due to the influence they command among prospective freshmen looking at colleges. This year Wash. U. ranked 12th.

But recently, the rankings have been part of a controversy that reflects an enormously complicated issue. On one hand, it is undeniable that some colleges and universities are better than others, and prospective freshmen have the right to use any resources which would help them make an informed decision about where to attend. Unfortunately, there is a slow-growing consensus among many colleges that some of the evaluation methods of the U.S. News and World Report are questionable at best and inaccurate at worst.

Already, a collection of 64 colleges and universities has signed a letter declaring their intentions to boycott the rankings. Why? Because the rankings “imply a false precision and authority that is not warranted by the data they use.” After reviewing the rankings’ methodology, we have come to agree with this assessment. As a result, we ask that Washington University join this boycott of the U.S. News and World Report college rankings.

An issue with the rankings is its methodology for measuring the educational quality of colleges and universities. Of a college’s final ranking, 25 percent is determined by its peer assessment score, an arbitrary assessment that asks presidents, provosts and deans of admission to rank their peer institutions’ academic programs on a scale of one to five. For engineering and business schools, the peer assessment score comprises 100 percent of their ranking. To make this process even more subjective, only 51 percent of the 4,269 people who were asked to fill out the peer assessment questionnaires for this year’s rankings actually did so.

Another questionable part of the U.S. News rankings methodology is its faculty resources assessment, a score that is based in large part on average faculty salaries.

None of this is to say that these measures are entirely useless; it’s just that they’re not the best way to evaluate a school’s overall quality. As the Washington Monthly puts it, the U.S. News and World Report’s methodology for determining a college’s overall quality is akin to “assessing the quality of restaurants based on the effectiveness of their advertising and how much they spend on linen.”

This is where Washington University can enter the scene. The reason why the U.S. News and World Report has resisted any substantive reforms thus far is because it has never faced a strong challenge from colleges and universities. The recent boycott effort is certainly the strongest challenge to date, but its support has been limited primarily to schools which are ranked in the “Liberal Arts Colleges” section of the U.S. News college rankings. As of yet, there has not been a single high-ranking college from the “National University” section to sign on to the boycott. Support from these schools is critical because their status as large, research-oriented universities gives them a high amount of clout and influence within the field of higher education. Without it, any efforts to reform the U.S. News college rankings will likely fail.

Therefore, if Washington University has any interest in assisting these reforms, it can do so by boycotting the U.S. News and World Report college rankings. This can be done in two ways. First, the administration must refuse to fill out the peer assessment forms from U.S. News. Second, the University must pledge to withhold any mention of its own U.S. News ranking in any promotional materials and admissions mailings.

These two actions will not harm Washington University in any significant way, but they will send an important message to others that the school is willing to help instigate some badly needed reforms even though it has clearly benefited from the rankings. Such a decision should surely not be made lightly, but principle alone should guide the administration to the right decision. It’s time to boycott the U.S. News and World Report rankings.

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