Even when they pretend not to, GW and every other institution that ranks below 3 continues to kowtow to U.S. News and World Report’s annual college rankings.

Your Sept. 16 story (“GW falls short of top 50 rank,” p. 1) is the usual sour grapes tale that appears in college papers across the country every year at this time. “We didn’t make the top ‘x,’ but that’s OK because the system is flawed and meaningless,” say the administrators, and the papers dutifully report it.

If universities really believe that the rankings are flawed, why don’t they stop publicly worrying over them? And when will college papers realize that the story is not what the presidents say about the rankings, but whether they really mean it?

And the undignified peer assessment campaigning that President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg complains of reminds me of something else – the letters I’ve received in past years from alumni relations asking me for a donation, no matter how small, specifically to increase GW’s rank in U.S. News’ “percentage of alumni who give” score. Now that is undignified.

-Kelly McCollum
class of ’95