How accurately do the USNWR rankings reflect a school's strength?

What qualifies as an “easy school”? For example, Brown has no specific core curriculum courses required for graduation, aside from 2 writing classes. Students at Brown can take most classes pass/fail, and failing grades are not recorded. Among graded classes, the vast majority of grades that are given are A’s. The trend on gradeinflation.com suggests the mean GPA at Brown should be between 3.7 and 3.8 today. Does this make Brown an “easy school”? If Brown is an “easy school”, you wouldn’t know it based on graduation rate or employment. Graduation rate and employment stats are similar to most other comparably selective schools, with similar major distribution.

As others have stated, a college’s average graduation rate is largely a function of selectivity and wealth, not whether the college is “easy”. Several studies have explained ~80% of variation in different colleges’ average 6-year graduation rate (0.9 correlation coefficient) by just looking at a combination of selectivity and wealth. One example is at https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED571993 . The study does find that colleges that are more focused on STEM fields tend to be lower than predicted by selectivity and wealth, but I wouldn’t call this the same as being an “easy school.”

Surveys of employers suggest the school name has relatively little influence when comparing applicants for jobs, aside from being known. As a whole they are certainly not focusing on whether it is a “easy school” and are instead focusing on things like relevant experience, desired skill set, college major, interview performance, a variety of soft skills, etc. For example, the survey of hundreds of employers at https://chronicle-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/5/items/biz/pdf/Employers%20Survey.pdf found college reputation was the least influential factor as a whole for evaluating resumes of new grads. Unknown or online colleges were an exception, as I’d expect would be non-accredited colleges.