Despite a growing revolt against the power of U.S. News and World Report's influential college rankings, the University of Michigan will continue to send information to the magazine.

Several liberal arts colleges - including Sarah Lawrence College and Barnard College - announced in June that they would no longer provide data to U.S. News and World Report because they say the rankings' methodology doesn't fully reflect their strengths. University President Mary Sue Coleman was critical of the rankings in a recent interview. She said she doesn't think there's much of a difference between the highest-ranked school and the 20th-ranked school, for example.

"The U.S. News can change the weight they put on the parameters and get dramatically different results," she said. "I think a belief that somehow there's a huge difference among top schools in the rankings is just a fallacy."

The University of Michigan ranked seventh in the magazine's first set of college rankings in 1983. It remained in the top 10 until 1989, when the magazine made a major change to its weighting system, and it fell to 25th. This year, the University of Michigan is ranked 24th and is tied with the University of California at Los Angeles for third among public universities behind the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Virginia.

Coleman said the University of Michigan has no plans to stop participating in the survey, though.

One reason is that the University is public and is therefore subject to public record laws. She said it would be antagonistic not to hand over the data because the magazine could file a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain it anyway.

Coleman said another reason is that the rankings draw attention to some of the University's advantages like its strong undergraduate research programs.

Some opponents of the rankings say the methodology can't accurately determine which schools are better because it doesn't measure personal preferences like location or campus type.

Others say the system favors private universities over public ones because statistics like endowment and class size are two of the most heavily weighted criteria. The first 19 schools in the 2008 rankings are private.

Sarah Lawrence spokeswoman Judith Schwartzstein said the college won't participate in the rankings after this year partly because they use SAT scores as an indicator of the quality of a school. Because Sarah Lawrence doesn't require SAT scores, it can't provide that information - and may suffer from it in the rankings, she said.

"We think it's flawed," she said. "Schools are very complex and this does not allow for a complex analysis."

University of Illinois spokeswoman Robin Kaler said the school will continue to participate in the U.S. News survey as long as its competitors continue providing information. She said school officials worry that students looking at the rankings would assume Illinois wasn't good enough to be ranked if it were missing from the list.

But Kaler said the system is too subjective because the most heavily weighted element of the ranking system is a rating by faculty from peer institutions.

"It's a popularity contest," she said. "It's not scientific."

To many students trying to pick among the nation's thousands of colleges, though, the rankings are gospel.

When LSA freshman Justin Simpson decided to attend the University, his decision was based on the University's location, cost and campus size. The University's reputation was also a factor, he said.

Simpson said he consulted U.S. News and World Report's annual college rankings at the beginning of his college search, paying close attention to how the magazine ranked the University's Ross School of Business and the College of Engineering, he said.

Simpson said that although choosing a college is ultimately based on individual preferences, he thinks the ranking system plays a role in many students' college searches.

"People like facts," he said. "They like to know the basis for what's better."