The annual "America's Best Colleges" issue of "U.S. News & World Report" is to the news magazine what the annual "Swimsuit" issue is to "Sports Illustrated." Both are best sellers that make big money for their publishers. And both succeed because they are sexy, glamorous, superficial and largely without redeeming social value. But "America's Best Colleges" has evolved into something else too: a widely recognized barometer and instigator of major higher education trends, and not all positive to the writer. This article presents several strategies that colleges across the country could adopt to improve their scores on one or more measuring sticks used by the "U.S. News" and thereby raise their rankings. However, most of these strategies contribute to bad public policy and undermine the integrity of the institution itself. Any college or university adopting these strategies, the writer warns, should not be naive about the potentially questionable role they are playing in a bigger game.