While a dozen college presidents from universities across the country are boycotting U.S. News & World Report in an attempt to minimize the importance of the magazine’s popular annual college rankings, Stanford has no intention of jumping on the bandwagon, according to Director of Admission Shawn Abbott.

Abbott also insisted that, unlike other schools, Stanford has never allowed the rankings to dictate University policies.

“During my short tenure at Stanford, no one — and I repeat, no one — has even remotely suggested or insinuated that the agenda of the Stanford Office of Undergraduate Admission should be directed or influenced by any ranking, much less U.S. News & World Report,” Abbott said in an email to The Daily.

Each year, the magazine releases lists that rank the nation’s top colleges and universities based on factors ranging from graduation and retention rate to student to faculty ratio and student demographics. Stanford was No. 4 on this year’s list, tied with the California Institute of Technology and MIT and behind Princeton, Harvard and Yale.

Earlier this month, presidents from a collection of schools across the country, including Lafayette and Dickinson Colleges, banded together to challenge the validity of these lists.

While Stanford does not plan on joining this consortium of schools, the University was on the forefront of a 1996 movement to challenge the U.S. News rankings. Then President Gerhard Casper sent a letter to the magazine and established a Web site to provide students with information about the ranking after the University slipped double-digit spots from the 1995 rankings to the 1996 list.

“Were U.S. News to walk away from these misleading rankings, it would be a powerful display of common sense,” Casper said in the 1996 letter. “I fear, however, that these rankings and their byproducts have become too attention-catching for that to happen.”

Casper’s words may have more resonance today, as the magazine’s annual rankings increasingly affect high school seniors in their college search.

There’s no question that U.S. News & World Report has increasingly cornered the market on college rankings,” Abbott said. “How much influence those rankings have is debatable. Our hope is that while prospective students might utilize the rankings as a starting point in investigating colleges, they should rely on actual primary research to ultimately select their college of choice. To pick a college based on its chart-placement in a news weekly is pretty reckless.”

Abbott recommended that prospective students survey a wide range of resources, including other ranking lists, which may take into account statistics that the U.S. News lists omit.

It’s fine to use rankings like U.S. News & World Report as a starting point to investigate basic demographic information about colleges, as long as it’s not the primary instrument used to make one’s ultimate selection,” Abbott said. “U.S. News & World Report isn’t the root of all evil, but only the woefully misinformed think that their rankings are handed down by God. Stanford was Stanford long before U.S. News & World Report.”