Eager high school students across the country thumbed through last week’s issue of US News & World Report, desperate to see the college ranking so widely anticipated that the press release announcing their publication was actually embargoed to generate suspense. After claims of leaked rankings lit up Internet blogs for weeks, the official rankings were released last Friday, met by a firestorm of controversy about their presumed importance.

Stanford remained fourth in magazine’s 2008 ranking, part of the annual “America’s Best Colleges” issue, trailing only perennial list-toppers Princeton, Harvard and Yale.

The ranking methodology takes into account factors including the SAT scores of incoming students, the percentage of freshmen in the top 10 percent of their high school class, the percentage of alumni who donate and, the most controversial criterion of all, “reputation” — a category in which college presidents score institutions other than their own.

“We’re pleased to be recognized as one of the top universities in the country,” said Jeff Wachtel ‘79, special assistant to President John Hennessy.

The rankings have received much criticism this year, as a rising tide of university presidents, education advocates and commentators have decried the list as misrepresentative of the mission of higher education.

Their cries against the rankings echoed the sentiments of former University President Gerhard Casper in the mid-1990s. Casper declared in an open letter to US News & World Report that universities can no more easily be ranked than magazines, calling the list “utterly misleading.”

Lloyd Thacker, director of the Education Conservancy, a Portland, Ore-based advocacy group and think-tank, is building an alliance of college presidents against the rankings. Sixty-four presidents have signed onto a letter refusing to submit the statistical data that forms the backbone of the rankings.

Wachtel said that Stanford will continue to submit data for the ranking system.

“[The rankings] do not affect Stanford’s behavior much,” he said. “We are pursuing a path we think is right. The rankings have no effect on the faculty’s approach to research.”

While Wachtel claimed Stanford was above succumbing to ranking-mania, Thacker argued that some schools want nothing more than to boost their status.

“Rankings become important for self-image and portraying success,” he said.

Thacker noted that need-based aid at universities has remained constant in the past decade while merit-based aid has increased six fold, as colleges more aggressively pursue high-scoring students in an effort to rise in the rankings.

Stanford does not offer merit-based aid.

“It’s irresponsible to rank colleges,” Thacker said. “The rankings imply a degree of precision and authority that is not supported by educational research. They do not measure what really matters in higher education.”

The rankings have spawned an entire industry that Thacker said amounts to more than $4 billion annually. Management consultants for universities alone account for $1 billion of that total. Thacker said the figures reflected the “commercialization of higher education.”

Many components of the rankings are arbitrary, according to Thacker. The “alumni giving rate” measures the percentage of alumni who donated, which he said is much more about the slickness of a University’s fundraising campaign than “alumni satisfaction,” as US News & World Report claims.

The “alumni giving rate” category also fails to measure the dollar amount of donations. For example, about 39 percent of alumni donated to Stanford last year, but the University raised a total of $903 million, much of that money coming from other sources. Princeton, on the other hand, raised only about $250 million, but 61 percent of alumni contributed, and the New Jersey school was thus ranked higher in the “alumni giving rate” category.

School of Education Prof. Denise Clark Pope, who has publicly advocated for a less-stressful college admissions process, also denounced the ranking system as creating undue pressure for high school students.

“[The rankings] are adding to the problem instead of being the solution,” she said. “There’s a misconception that highest-ranked is best. They foster an incorrect message that everyone should strive for the highest-ranked schools.”

“It’s crazy to rank schools on an overall basis,” she added. “Each person is looking for different components.”