<p>But having a highly ranked medical and law school, in theory at least, has nothing to do with undergrad. However, it might certainly have an effect on peer assessment, because again people just get a general “feeling” about a school, based on factors that are often inaccurate or not relevant. That is what the discussion was really about. Iowa is a fine school, of course. Maybe its PA is exactly where it should be, maybe it is actually too low, or maybe it is too high. That is unanswerable, because there is no real standard or absolute measure for this, and just asking a bunch people, a lot of whom are east coast and west coast and probably don’t really know much about U Iowa, doesn’t prove a thing. Again, they come the question, think “Oh right, they have that famous writing workshop” and the score goes up from a 2 to a 3 or a 3 to a 4, for instance. Quite possibly based on one famous program, that actually impacts most undergrads very little, Iowa gets a significant boost. This is why PA is flawed, certainly overweighted by a huge amount, and should be discarded along with the entire USNWR ranking system.</p>