A number of schools are balking at further participation in the US News and World Report college guides, arguing that it is not a valid survey of school quality. Read the article here; I haven't seen anything to indicate that UPS will follow their lead. Of course, the catch is that there isn't any comparable alternative.
Or rather, there is, but there's no public access to it. The National Survey of Student Engagement has been done for a number of years, asking students to assess such things as the level of academic challenge, interaction with faculty members, and the like. The surveys provide benchmarks against which colleges can compare themselves, but most schools do not share their own data on how their school stacks up against the average. This would be an easy way, it would seem, to bring an end to the US News rankings, but it would require schools to "expose" themselves to the public and each other, finding out where they fell--not a risk most schools want to take, and one that would be difficult to get a majority of schools to agree to at the same time.
To see how one school has posted their data, check out Elon College's NSSE overview here. And here's an older article about the sensitivity of the NSSE information. And US News has started posting NSSE data from those schools that would share it; find it here.
