When Princeton associate dean and director of admission Stephen LeMenager used the names and Social Security numbers of 11 applicants to look up their records on a Yale admissions Web site, he took the war among elite universities for top-drawer students to a new level. But the tactic shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s applied to college recently. College admissions officers have their schools’ reputations at stake when they sit down to review applicants. The prize they’re after is their institution’s ranking in the U.S. News & World Report’s annual list of the country’s best colleges and universities.

High-school students who want to go to elite schools can rattle off the rankings of the top 10 faster than they can recite their SAT vocabulary words. U.S. News & World Report distills many of the schools’ qualities — such as graduation rate, student-to-faculty ratio, campus diversity, and average SAT scores — down to numbers that have become the gold standard of college reputations.

One of the most important factors in the U.S. News assessment is selectivity, which measures how many applicants a finicky admissions office rejects in favor of the best and brightest. In addition to factoring in accepted students’ standardized-test scores and high-school-class rank, the selectivity stat incorporates a college’s acceptance rate (how many students are admitted out of how many applicants) and the admissions " yield " (how many accepted students actually attend). Admissions officers try to control this ranking by offering admission only to top applicants; what they can’t control is whether those applicants accept the offers. Since kids often hedge their bets by applying to several elite schools, it’s entirely possible that LeMenager, who invaded Yale’s Web site after Ivy League admissions offers had been mailed out this spring, was looking for a shortcut for future use — a way to identify students who had applied to (or accepted a berth at) Yale so Princeton can reject them, thus boosting Princeton’s yield and, consequently, its selectivity ranking.

In U.S. News and World Report’s 2002 university ranking, Princeton topped the list — ahead of Harvard, Yale, Cal Tech, and MIT — but placed fourth in selectivity behind Harvard, Yale, and MIT. (Selectivity ranking was based on classes entering school in fall of 2000.) It’s easy to see how that fourth-place finish might have motivated the Princeton admissions office to try a little harder.

College admissions is a high-stakes game, and one can see why LeMenager might be desperate to up his average. But in the end, turning the admissions process into a war — which encourages admissions officers to behave like secret agents — does more to erode a school’s reputation than it does to build it up.