October 10, 2007 - 11:00pm
By Nikhita Parandekar
The debate over college rankings took off earlier this year, when an article in The Washington Post revealed that U.S. News and World Report was using an arbitrary average SAT score to rank Sarah Lawrence College after the school stopped requiring SAT scores from its applicants.
On Sept. 7, 19 presidents of top liberal arts colleges signed a statement that discouraged the use of college rankings. Colleges that signed the statement aimed to reduce bias in the admissions process.
The statement read, “We commit not to mention … rankings in any of our new publications.”