STOP WHINING ALREADY!

With all the weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth heard all across the campus recently, you'd think that Harvard students heard stallions braying and trampling hooves pounding on asphalt as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse gallopped up J.F.K. Street. But their cause for alarm was actually Harvard's slip from first to third place in the annual U.S. News and World Report college rankings. Apparently, students at Stanford are also reacting hysterically to their tumble from fourth to sixth place.

A Stanford-led coalition of college students is now attempting to force U.S. News and World Report to abandon its rankings or switch to a system that groups top schools together. The coalition wants colleges and universities to withhold data from the magazine until it reforms its list. Nothing could be more ridiculous.

At Harvard, a movement to support this coalition may be starting. Apparently students at Yale and Princeton are expressing interest as well, although I'd bet that their interest stems from polite false humility and that they won't be too active in the crusade to dump the rankings. Although one of the organizers of the Stanford coalition denies that this movement stems from "sour grapes," it's pretty clear that bitter envy is the driving force behind the effort to reform the rankings. Had Stanford been ranked number one, no one from Stanford would be whining.

Of course the rankings are pretty subjective, as the critics claim. But U.S. News and World Report perennially ranks services and institutions from hospitals to mutual funds and they should continue to make up lists as they see fit. Opponents of the rankings also assert that they are "taken as dogma" by and exert undue influence over students, employers and the general public.

However, students at top schools such as Stanford and Harvard should not be so upset. None of them are going to be passed over for those highly competitive jobs in investment banking and consulting because Harvard is now ranked third. You won't be rejected by a top graduate school because of the U.S. News list. And if prospective students are dumb enough to pick a college based on its rank in a magazine, we don't need them here anyway. Students at Harvard and other schools should eat their pride, stop complaining and concentrate on their educations.