[adas0693]

Thank you for your feedback. I am one of the authors of this paper.

I don't think the paper gives any hints on us dividing universities into classes and comparing. Would love to know how you reached that conclusion.

At the same time, yes, we could have divided universities into different classes: research vs liberal arts, this vs. that state, big vs. small size, etc. These are all trivial groupings but none of these would change the conclusions of this paper. For all practical purposes, we could easily have replaced the university names with labels like U1, U2, ... and still the conclusions would not change. What matters is how a weight-based composite index can be gamed and the paper does show that in multiple ways. Pls review the ILP formulations yourself and run them on the dataset of your choice.