Ambivalence towards the U.S. News & World Report college rankings typically runs high every August, but this year a particular potency lingered about the threats of boycott. Since this summer, 63 college presidents have signed their names to a letter from the Education Conservancy indicating commitment to a boycott. Amherst College, like a majority of its elite liberal arts counterparts, has not.

The College has instead chosen the road most traveled, as articulated in a recent joint statement released by 19 leading colleges. A part of it reads, "We commit not to mention U.S. News or similar rankings in any of our new publications, since such lists mislead the public into thinking that the complexities of American higher education can be reduced to one number."

This stance is ideologically equivocal, but quite necessary.

Few, if any, college administrators agree entirely with U.S. News' methodology; most nevertheless have little incentive to divest their colleges completely from it.

The conflict presents itself rather simply. The rankings' populist authority, strengthened by a generation of college-bound teens and their parents, poses a very immediate threat to delinquent institutions. Reed College, and more recently Sarah Lawrence College, took the lead in rejecting U.S. News; both were unceremoniously dumped into lower tiers. Amherst College has more than most to lose.

President Marx has said, somewhat dramatically, in a TIME piece on the boycott, "Evaluating education in a way that rewards institutions for building Jacuzzis and rock walls [to boost absolute per-pupil spending] as much as for investing in what happens in the classroom is a system that is leading us in the wrong direction." That may be. This system, however, brings to this College an important student demographic: students with no prior exposure whatsoever to Amherst.

The investment this insitution has in maintaining its heady rank reaches beyond attracting prestige-conscious high school seniors. It alters our pulling power with prospects from lower-income backgrounds. It disturbs the confidence of recent and future graduates in their ability to secure desired careers.

In the realpolitik of higher education hierarchies, the College must tread with care in a potentially pernicious game. Forming a coalition of the strong and defiant has been a shrewd symbolic stroke. Our administrators must-and appear to have-acknowledge the futility of further action.

Look instead, we say, to an ongoing project at the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU). U-CAN, to be launched this month, "will consist of hundreds of institutional profiles that contain comparable data and links to qualitative campus information." Once refined, this may spawn a new breed of education consumers, adequately informed and in control.