"I really downplay the importance [of the rankings]," said Richard Nesbitt, director of admissions of Williams College. "The small differences ... are insignificant ... and impossible to quantify ... I don't put a huge amount of stock in it."
According to Nesbitt, Williams currently employs 15 percent more faculty than it did three years ago. However, Nesbitt said the increase in faculty was more in reaction to the College's needs than to the rankings.
Williams has a lower student/teacher ratio of 8:1 versus the College ratio of 9:1, and a higher percentage of full-time faculty, at 97 percent, versus the College's 95 percent.
The biggest part of Williams improvement was curricular, increasing the number of small tutorial classes in the past three years.
Seventy percent of Williams classes have fewer than 20 students, while only 67 percent of classes here meet that criteria. However, the College has fewer classes with over 50 students, with four percent versus seven percent, respectively.
Amherst and Williams tied in the categories of peer assessment score, average freshmen retention rate and graduation and retention rate.
However, the College fell behind in the category of financial resources, in which it was ranked 13th while Williams was ranked fifth.
The College also topped Williams in the alumni giving rate, with 64 percent of College alumni donating versus 60 percent of Williams alumni.
The Colleges administration has, for the most part, expressed indifference to the rankings. "The dean of students office ... really and truly doesn't care," said Dean of Students Ben Lieber. "I've said this all along [when we were ranked first], but the number one ranking doesn't mean anything and ... the number two ranking doesn't either. It's ludicrous to think that there's anything different with Amherst from last year."
Tom Parker, dean of admissions at the College, expressed similar views. "We certainly prefer to be number one, but it isn't upsetting in any way," said Parker. "We're not troubled. We have been number one more times than any other college or university. Given that Amherst, Swarthmore and Williams have been separated by tiny margins, it was inevitable that we would and will swap places periodically."
Students expressed interest in the report.
"It really doesn't bother me. I think it's good we're high on the list, but the rankings sometimes seem random to a certain extent," said Shannon Dobson '06.
However, Jae Chang '05 was angered by the news. "It really upsets me that we have lost to our academic rival," she said.
"It's a good thing we've fallen to number two. It will motivate the administration to improve things rather than maintain the status quo," said Brooks Paige '06.
Neither the dean of students' personnel nor the admissions officers is concerned about the effect of the College's ranking on applications for this fall. "I doubt it will have any effect at all," said Lieber. Parker said that "I would never advise a student to pick number one over number two or three on the basis of rankings. There are far better criteria available."
U.S. News made a small but potentially significant change to the way it ranks schools by dropping the yield rate statistic from its formula, according to The New York Times. This statistic quantifies the number of students who are admitted to an institution who later enroll.
Concern has grown over the past years that colleges and universities have increasingly turned to binding early decision programs, which require students who apply to attend, in order to increase their yield rates.
Although the yield rate accounted for only two percent of a college's overall score, reports that colleges considered the yield statistic important enough to admit more students through early decision prompted U.S. News to drop the statistic, according to The Times. However, Dean Parker did not believe the change had any significant effect on the College's rank.
"What we've been told is that schools felt they could manipulate their ranking by manipulating the yield number," Sara Sklaroff, the U.S. News education editor, told The Times. "We were basically in a position where this tiny number was muddying the waters of a pretty important debate."