Amidst all the chatter about the anxiety of admissions and the challenge that colleges and universities have deciding which students ought to be allowed to attend their institution or alternatively matriculate at Harvard, we seem to have overlooked that it is rating season once again.

U.S. News and World Report’s April 7-14 issue tells us about “America’s Best Graduate Schools” and provides a roster of law, business, medical and other professional schools listed 1,2,3 and 100 in the case of the law schools and other numbers for other disciplines. Just as the high school seniors and applicants to graduate and professional schools have been wringing their hands waiting to hear if they got the fat or the thin envelop, the green light or the red light, are they going to New Haven next year or who knows where, the schools themselves wait each year to discover where they have been placed by Bob Morse, America’s most powerful educator.

Many will ask, “Who the hell is Bob Morse?” We know he’s not Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. He is, for those out of the loop, the editor at U.S. News & World Report who’s in charge of rankings. It is he who drives the process, fine-tunes the data and resets the formula. It is he who cheers or crushes the dreams of deans, faculty, students, alumni, not to mention university presidents, as their programs rise and fall, year by year.

The top one or two spots commanded by the usual suspects, the rest distributed almost predictably, but not with absolute certainty, among the rest of the nation’s schools. I’ve read criticisms of the ranking systems over the years; different groups have argued its shortcomings, myself included. “Pooh, pooh,” I said, “Who cares? Not scientific.” Law deans have decried the rankings publicly and privately, written opinion pages in their alumni magazines, signed petitions urging the abolition of the rankings, and said they weren’t going to play by failing to provide the requested data. Likewise, organizations of undergraduate colleges decrying the unfairness of it all and arguing the virtues of their curriculum, the qualities of their campuses, the specialness of their location. Me too.

As a university president, I couldn’t imagine why a small if high-quality university, located in a New England village, would rank ahead of a comprehensive university like my own, located in the nation’s capital. Where is the sense, I thought, in going there? Where if you wanted an experiential opportunity you had to travel an hour, unlike my own institution, which at no extra cost threw in all the professional, social, and cultural resources of Washington, D.C. How could anyone rank ahead of us, I wondered, unless of course it was Columbia, which is, as they say, Columbia University in the City of New York.

A lot of good any of the complaining did me, or anyone else. Over 20 years, despite my best efforts — building buildings, hiring new faculty, growing the endowment, starting new programs, standing on my head spitting nickels, we never moved very much up or down — always 49th, 50th or 51st, on a bad year 52nd, tied with Pepperdine. Different schools and programs within the university had better luck with subgroup rankings. The law school is in the top 20. Likewise high-flying programs in international affairs, education, business, and others which managed to weave together what they did with what was otherwise available near by to create a stronger, better case.

The rankings remind me sometime of what it is like to be a member of the mafia. You can’t get out; we’re married to the mob. So when institutions occasionally say they are not going to play, they are going to boycott U.S. News and World Report — if we don’t give them the information they seek, they’ll starve to death, Bob Morse finds a way. He gets enough of what he needs from third parties and attributes rankings to the school whether they like it or not, and generally they don’t like it.

This month’s issue of the American Bar Association Journal has an article about the dissatisfaction of law-school deans and their rankings. But Bob Morse is grinning at us from the cover! The story tells us that Morse is determined to make the rankings better. And it is true, whenever I’ve called him, written him, invited him to come visit, he responded affirmatively. He even changed the undergraduate roster to accommodate my suggestion that the top 50 gave an incomplete picture of the “best” institutions in the country and a list of the top 100 would be a far more useful, if not a more equitable, instrument for his readers. And so now we are provided with the top 100.

The thrust of the ABA piece is that Morse is determined to keep making a living at U.S. News and World Report. He is not going away. So it is in his interest and in ours (“ours” being broadly defined) to perfect, to the extent possible, the very, very soft social science that supports his work. Morse concedes the limitation of his enterprise. He doesn’t think he’s a scientist. And he recognizes some of his imperfections and the limitations of the data and the process. But he basically argues it’s the best we’ve got. There are, of course, imitators, others who do rankings. They produce special lists of business schools, or law schools, or for that matter, graduate Ph.D programs. And all have their strengths and weaknesses.

As somebody who has argued against this enterprise for a long time, I’m surprised to discover that I’m growing less judgmental. I don’t want to concede that the rankings, which often turn the complex into the simple — perhaps even the simpleminded — have finally persuaded me. Creating a roster of universities as if you were articulating the order of basketball teams for the final four of the NCAA is madness in March or any other month.

I’ve often told friends and family as well as university moms and dads who ask me which was the best school that there was no best school. Schools were like shoes. If you have a ten-and-a-half-size foot, the most wonderful handcrafted size-9 shoe simply wouldn’t do and would hurt. And a size 13 would make you look clownish. Sometimes, St. John’s College in Annapolis is the best school in America, and then for somebody else, with a different set of interests and aptitudes, it is Cal Tech or Julliard. Best is relative, contingent, and yet … and yet, who can deny our fascination with lists? Americans, including myself, love lists.

Washingtonian magazine this month has a list of the best doctors in Washington. As soon as it came out I looked to see if my personal physician was ranked. I knew he was terrific even before I opened the pages. And yet I took satisfaction in seeing his name there. It made me feel smarter for having him as my doctor. I took pleasure in calling with congratulations. And he seemed pleased to hear from me, as well.

In the end we need to yield to the national character and acknowledge the inevitable. Recognizing the circumstances, we need to work with Morse to make these silly rankings better, more informed, and perhaps, in context, useful. And, we need to look to ourselves as universities, colleges, law schools, and medical schools to help educate consumers, if I can use that word about our services, about how “customers” (good grief!) can use rankings to help them in their deliberations and us in our aspirations.