<p>More on Reed and the USNWR, old but informative:</p>
<p>U.S. News and World Report hat trick</p>
<p>By Harriet Watson </p>
<p>For the third consecutive year the college has refused to return surveys to U.S News and World Report for its annual “best colleges” rankings issue. And for the third consecutive year this face-off has put Reed in the national spotlight.
The October 16 issue of Rolling Stone magazine prominently mentioned Reed in “The College Rankings Scam,” an article that raised serious concerns about the U.S. News college rankings.</p>
<p>“[The editors at U.S. News] had never met with such a prominent school being so stubborn,” wrote Rolling Stone about Reed’s refusal to cooperate in 1995. “So U.S. News punished Reed College. They gave it the lowest possible score in nearly every category. The school plunged to the bottom quartile. No other college had dropped so far, so fast.” Acknowledging that it was wrong to punish Reed for being the lone holdout in the prestigious national liberal arts and national universities categories, U.S. News editor Al Sanoff told Rolling Stone “Let’s just say we did not handle it the right way.”</p>
<p>Last year an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times by a leader of the student government at Stanford University (and one of the founders of that student body’s Forget U.S. News Coalition initiative, FUNC) praised Reed for refusing to provide information to U.S. News and advised prospective students to go to Reed if they “want to go to a school that isn’t interested in selling out its education.” (That op-ed can still be found on the FUNC web site, <a href=“http://www-leland.stanford.edu/group/assu/func/[/url]”>http://www-leland.stanford.edu/group/assu/func/</a>.)</p>
<p>The college has repeatedly asked the editors at U.S. News simply to drop Reed from its best-colleges issue, yet they continue to include us and to harvest data from non-college, information-gathering sources. Our subsequent yo-yo relationship with U.S. News has turned into quite a spectator sport: in 1996, the year after Reed was singled out for special censorious treatment and relegated to the lowest tier in its category, the magazine trumpeted Reed in its “best colleges” press release as being new to the “top 40” tier of national liberal arts schools; and this year the college is in the second tier, even though the magazine’s sources rate the college’s academic reputation as high or higher than half of the top-ranked schools.</p>