If you're trying to ascertain which universities actually produce academic results for students, using US News and World Report is a horrible place to start. For years, writers and education experts have been openly critical of US News' annual survey of the "top" colleges because their ranking system is a complete fraud. Their grading metric for schools changes every year, so you really can't tell if a school "improved" or not over the course of the year. Some of the things they measure (diversity, male/female ratio, "peer assessment", etc.) have nothing,
nothing to do with the actual quality of education. Furthermore, results based statistics--like how much kids actually learn, how many get good jobs after graduation--are completely omitted. In fact, you could make a case that US News' rankings are little more than a beauty contest, where schools intentionally warp their numbers to fit the pre-established criteria of these magazines. Some schools have even lied to magazines about their numbers to get more free publicity. And, of course, we know that UNC would
never lie about academics in order to win a competition.
Why do you think there's such a huge discrepancy between one magazine's rankings and another's? Because they're all basing their results on qualifiers that are completely inconsistent and often unreliable.
I've been teaching HS kids for 15 years now and I have found one truth regarding kids choosing colleges: that there is no one "best" college for every kid. Ultimately, it comes down to what the kid wants to major in, how far he wants to be from home, how much money he has lined up, and what campus environment fits his personality. Trying to use these list to justify that one college is better or worse to another reeks of the kind of desperation a homer feels when he knows the hammer is ready to fall.
US News & World Report is Garbage
Forbes is Garbage Too