The College Rankings Revolt

College presidents are a fairly unflappable lot, but nothing gets their goat quite like the issue of rankings. Take a complex institution, crunch it down into a single number, and the adjectives start flying: "Silly." "Snotty." "Scandalous." Echoing many of his peers, Robert Weisbuch, president of Drew University, blames the rank-ordering of diverse schools for much of the current college-admissions frenzy. "It's almost as though we've created a monster," he says. And yet, despite years of vituperation, most schools keep dutifully filling out the surveys...