[lazyjeff]

One interesting thing is the US News College Rankings sues a completely system of measurements than the field-specific rankings, e.g. the US News Computer Science Rankings. The latter is based only on "the judgments of deans and senior faculty members of computer science departments at institutions around the country."

I've been obsessed with computer science rankings for a while, and worked with others to compare US News Computer Science rankings with other computer science rankings: https://drafty.cs.brown.edu/csopenrankings/

Some rankings are naturally harder to game, like that your bachelors or doctoral graduates get hired as professors at other research universities. Or that professors at your universities win best paper awards at leading conferences. So I've been looking at whether various rankings are "biased".

There's some clear biases with US News, like it ranks CalTech as 11, but CalTech is listed as rank 39 in the aggregate because it does poorly on faculty publications and best paper awards. Yale CS is another example of a highly ranked department by US News (rank 20), that has an aggregated ranking of 35. Harvard CS does amazing with placement (ranked 6 for their undergraduate and doctoral students becoming professors), but has an aggregate ranking of 23.