Dissing US News

By now most of you have probably seen the story that a number of small colleges have essentially agreed not to cooperate with U.S. News in its compilation of its annual college rankings and that they are planning to formulate their own rankings system to compete directly with the US News rankings.

This news at least raises the specter of a similar agreement among law school deans not to cooperate with the annual law school rankings. Is this likely to happen? Are the antitrust consequences of such an agreement too scary? Is the collective action problem too difficult to overcome? Do too many schools benefit from the rankings to participate? Are there structural differences between small colleges and law schools that make a similar agreement unlikely at the law school level?

I've argued in print that more rankings are a good thing and that the more rankings that are out there, the less power any one of them is. Are we seeing the start of that progress this morning?