MeasureYourself, Reed requires the SAT:
http://www.reed.edu/apply/applying_t...p_instruct.pdf
Secondly, even if it's true that all the top LACs are hard (which is not true by the way cough* Amherst *cough), some like Reed perhaps are more difficult than others, which would explain the low graduation rate.
Danas, you state that US News unfairly ranks Reed yet you use US News to support your claims against the school! A high alumni contribution rate tells you nothing about the academics at the school. To me, it says two things: 1) Man, school X has a damn good development office and 2) Wow, school X's basketball team must have won the NCAA last year.
Third, acceptance rate is another almost worthless factor when considering the academics at a school. In fact, a reputation for rigor often scares away applicants. The University of Chicago is the perfect example. Your typical student applies to a school for all sorts of reasons that often have nothing to do with the quality of education (i.e. geography, climate, sports, availability of major, brand name, etc.). And doesn't an applicant pool that self-selects for Reed's prodigious ph.d rate indicate that the school must have an excellent academic environment?
Fourth, peer assessment score is a valuable way to measure the quality of a school, but the way US News conducts its survey makes it meaningless in this case. The "experts" US News surveys are ill qualified to assess all these schools because they often know nothing about the schools they're being asked to evaluate. A dean from Lewis & Clark for instance would probably give Reed a very high rating while giving Haverford (or insert some other great school that one may not know anything about) a very low one. I also suspect an east coast bias in effect since many of the most well-known LACs are located in that region.
The most serious charge that can be levelled against Reed is its low graduation rate, and I'm sure a host of factors contribute to this. By the way, Measure what gave you the impression that Reed has a culture of hard drug use? I know it has a reputation for pot, but that's hardly a "hard" drug. If you're referring to the student who died from a heroin overdose, I doubt that incident is representative of the campus culture. Also, the school has been nothing but open about what happened.