U.S. News & World Report magazine has ranked Northwestern 13th among national universities in its annual survey, one notch above its ranking last year.

Princeton University topped the list in U.S. News’ controversial “America’s Best Colleges” special issue, released last month. NU tied with Rice University.

While they said they were not disappointed with NU’s position, some NU administrators dismissed the rankings as too subjective and said other polls prove that students don’t pay attention to them.

“I’m not a fan of these things,” University President Henry Bienen said. “We don’t know how or what they’re doing (to calculate the rankings).”

While U.S. News includes an explanation of the components of the formula it uses to determine the rankings, the magazine concedes that annual changes to the formula render year-to-year comparisons fruitless.

“Since we may change our methodology from year to year, we do not invite readers to track colleges’ annual moves in the rankings,” the editors wrote in the magazine.

“U.S. News needs to sell magazines, so they tinker with the figures,” said Rebecca Dixon, associate provost of university enrollment. She cited last year’s first-place ranking of the research-intensive California Institute of Technology.

“(Cal Tech) is a very fine institution,” she said. “But it’s mainly research, and many found it strange it came out on top.”

In this year’s special issue, U.S. News editors acknowledged that Cal Tech rose to the top last year after the magazine readjusted its formula. Cal Tech dropped to fourth place this year after the formula’s financial resource component — the average per-student expenditure — was recalculated.

Surveys revealed that incoming freshmen actually put rankings low on a list of factors in their college selection, Dixon said.

“The view we get from our own students who have interest in the subject is that it might validate their choice,” she said.

Dixon also dismissed the largest component of the U.S. News formula, academic reputation, as a “popularity contest.” U.S. News surveys the top officials of the institutions in a category to determine a school’s academic reputation.

“Schools in the Ivy League … will have higher academic scores than schools that provide an equally strong education,” Dixon said.

Other factors include retention and graduation rates, and selectivity in admitting students. Most of the data are self-reported by schools, Dixon said, which also can lead to skewed information.

“I’m not trying to trash the whole process,” she said. “(But) the students are conscientious enough that they don’t go ga-ga over the rankings.”