New college rankings have hit the public eye, along with much scrutiny of how the process of placing the schools is done.

Earlier this year, a band of liberal arts schools joined together under the name of education activist Lloyd Thacker. He is encouraging schools to boycott the U.S. News & World Report list, calling it nothing more than an annual beauty contest.

The rankings receive such criticism due to the fact that 25 percent of how the 1,400 included institutions are weighed and measured has to do with popular opinion — or what the magazine calls "peer assessment."

Westminster College, Utah's only comprehensive liberal arts college, agrees that many college ratings systems are flawed, which raises serious questions about the validity of the rankings done by U.S. News.

"None of the factors they rate say anything about what or how learning happens once the students are in college," said Westminster President Michael Bassis. He said the "peers" evaluating the schools have no real knowledge of what happens on campus.

The Salt Lake City school ranks fairly well in the U.S. News listing year after year and has no plans to discontinue participation in the magazine's popular list. But the school is joining the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in the development of an alternate consumer information system that is designed to capture the most salient information on colleges for use by prospective students and their families.

"We will continue to encourage people who are comparing colleges to evaluate many factors," Bassis said. "Picking a college isn't easy but given the impact that decision can have on a student's life, it is worth the time and effort to compare schools on the full range of issues that truly matter."

About 62 schools, most of them smaller institutions, have joined the anti-rankings campaign. And it had a "a negligible effect on the outcome of the report," said U.S. News & World Report Editor Brian Kelly.

"It's not very significant," he said. "It's a very small group of schools ... we respect their position on this but we have a philosophical disagreement with them."

Dissenters of the list believe that the quality of institutions cannot be reduced to numbers, but Kelly said in a conference call Thursday that "colleges, on some levels, can be looked at through broad measures."

Other colleges and universities in Utah had no intention of withdrawing from the rankings protocol, and Amanda Covington, spokeswoman for the Utah System of Higher Education, said earlier this year that despite the controversy, the rankings have been a helpful marketing tool and the Board of Regents, the governing body for Utah's public colleges and universities, would not encourage any institution to join the boycott.

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E-mail: wleonard@desnews.com