The Rankings Rebel

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Lloyd Thacker, founder and director of the nonprofit Education Conservancy, and the originator of the college rankings revolt

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Doug Bennett, president of Earlham College in Richmond, Ind., said that Thacker has found a way to tap into the concerns of educators about the college admissions process. "It's always interesting to be in a room when he talks to an audience for the first time," Bennett said. "They sense his passion and he gets at the issues in a hurry. People say, Yeah, I recognize that issue.' There really wasn't anyone before Lloyd stepped up drawing together this whole nest of issues."

That's not to say that Thacker doesn't have his critics. Foremost among them is Brian Kelly, the editor of the rankings at U.S. News & World Report. He believes that Thacker is using his publication as a "convenient scapegoat."

Tilting at Windmills?

"He seems like a decent, energetic guy who I think has misguided his targets," said Kelly. "He has used us cleverly to focus his energies. There are a whole lot of other problems facing higher education than rankings, which get blamed for things that are not necessarily true."

Thacker may be tilting at windmills. Kevin Carey, research and policy manager at Education Sector, an independent education policy think thank, says he believes it will be near impossible for college presidents to dismantle U.S. News' ranking system—even with a proposed new assessment system put together by the schools themselves.

"I'm skeptical as to whether it will work, unless they can come up with some new data that [are] not in the U.S. News survey," he said. "The reason that the U.S. News survey is as influential as it is, is because it includes every university and it is easy to understand and comparable. That's what consumers want. It will be a little hard for those colleges to compete on that level."

But that's an argument Thacker doesn't buy. He believes that his movement has the potential to grow and eventually include public colleges, groups which he says suffer the most in the rankings because they don't have the endowments and wealth of the private schools.

He plans to release a study later this summer that will document the stress encountered by high school students during the admissions process. He's in the process of setting up a formal board of trustees for his organization and has dozens of speaking engagements booked over the next year, not to mention the possibility of a new book on the horizon. "The biggest burden is, I don't want to let people down," he said. "This is bigger than Lloyd Thacker. I'm just trying to carry the ball for a little while."

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Damast is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.