There's no direct way to measure the quality of an institution -- how well a college manages to inform, inspire, and challenge its students. So the U.S. News algorithm relies instead relies instead on proxies for quality -- and the proxies for educational quality turn out to be flimsy at best. ...

[The U.S. News rankings don't] include price. Both its college rankings and its law-school rankings reward schools for devoting lots of financial resources to educating their students, but not for being affordable. Why? [Robert] Morse admitted that there was no formal reason for that position. It was just a feeling. ... U.S. News thinks that schools that spend lots of money on their students are nicer than those that don't, and that this niceness ought to be factored into the equation of desirability. ...

[G]iven that the rising cost of college has become a significant social problem in the United States in recent years, you can make a strong case that a school ought to be rewarded for being affordable. So suppose we go back to [Jeff] Stake's rankings game, and re-rank law schools based on ... a three-factor ranking, counting value for the dollar at 40%, LSAT scores at 40%, and faculty publishing at 20% [using 2008 data]. ...

Chicago BYU Harvard Yale Texas Virginia Colorado Alabama Stanford Pennsylvania Georgetown Columbia U. Washington Kansas Arizona Mississippi Minnesota William & Mary George Mason Cornell Northwestern Washington & Lee North Carolina Iowa Kentucky Houston UC-Berkeley Wyoming UNLV Hawaii Idaho Illinois NYU Wake Forest Georgia Arkansas-Fayetteville Texas Tech District of Columbia Oklahoma SUNY-Buffalo Arizona State Puerto Rico Michigan South Dakota Utah Temple UCLA CUNY Vanderbilt Arkansas-Little Rock

[T]he Yales of the world will always succeed at the U.S. News rankings because the U.S. News system is designed to reward Yale-ness. ... Rankings are not benign. They enshrine very particular ideologies, and, at a time when American higher education is facing a crisis of accessibility and affordability, we have adopted a de-facto standard of college quality that is uninterested in both of those factors.