U.S. News & World Report releases its annual college rankings tomorrow in the face of the loudest and best-organized criticism from educators the magazine has yet encountered.

But for all the complaints that the rankings warp college admissions and distract colleges from education, colleges are having a hard time quitting the magazine's annual beauty contest.

Sixty-two colleges have enlisted in an anti-rankings campaign led by education activist Lloyd Thacker. But a quick Web search shows that even some of those schools haven't fulfilled a pledge to stop using their rankings to advertise themselves. And none of the highest-ranked schools have formally signed on.

Interviews by the Associated Press with top officials at about a dozen elite colleges confirm a fault line in the rankings debate that's more than coincidence: It irks educators everywhere to see colleges ranked like basketball teams. But it irks educators at the top-ranked colleges a lot less.

"The list isn't perfect but it isn't totally evil, either," said David Oxtoby, the president of Pomona College in California, the No. 7 liberal arts college on last year's list. The popular rankings are a way for students and parents to get information, he said.

The debate has been going on since the ranking began in the 1980s. But the focus this year is on Thacker, a longtime admissions counselor who has made it his mission to reform what he calls an over-commercialized college selection process. Thacker has been calling on colleges to boycott a portion of the rankings, to swear off using them for self-promotion, and to develop an alternative.

But so far no liberal arts college ranked higher than No. 30 on last year's list has signed the letter, nor have any of the top 100 universities.

Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College in upstate New York, wrote to U.S. News and fellow college presidents that he would sign on to the protest if schools like Harvard, Princeton and Williams do so first. "To end a corrupt and misleading game, the winners, not the losers, have to call it quits."

Some college officials say the rankings are a fact of life — and not an entirely bad one.

"In some respects, colleges and universities may have been too immune in the past to any kind of accountability for our practices, and students and families deserve to know as much as possible about the educational investment that they are about to make," said Robert Clagett, dean of admission at Middlebury College in Vermont, in an e-mail.

"I'm more concerned about students who aren't paying any attention to their college search than I am about students who are paying too much," said Stephen Farmer, the University of North Carolina's admissions director.

Brian Kelly, editor of U.S. News, says Thacker's efforts miss the point: There is already ample other college data available, and people just come to U.S. News to make sense of it all, he says.