<p>What is interesting to me is how closely these ratings reflect the US News rankings. It’s popular on CC to berate US News as unscientific, meaningless, biased, rigged, etc. However, when you tease apart the individual ranking factors, and even when you consider ratings like this one that USNWR does not use, you find that very often they point to the same set (if not the exact same ordering) of top schools. HYPSM, Columbia, AWS, Pomona, Wellesley: these same schools appear at or near the top of the bond ratings, and at or near the head of the US News rankings. It seems there are not too many “Little Engine That Could” colleges (schools with, say, a BBB bond rating that nevertheless make the US News top 100). Conversely, among all the AA and better schools, I see very few that do not make the USNWR top 100 LACs or national universities.</p>