@Sue22 - Agreed. There are parts of the US News rankings that I don’t believe are very relevant and/or biased (such as alumni giving that will always hamper public universities). However, I think the public gives more weight to the US News rankings because they do reflect selectivity fairly well and, let’s face it, they generally “make sense” based in real life. Very few people take a ranking that doesn’t have Harvard/Yale/Princeton consistently at the top very seriously, so when they see the US News rankings have those schools at or near the top every year while they generally don’t have many or any “strange” schools in its top 25, it’s actually comforting in a way. In essence, people look to the US News rankings more than any other because those rankings confirm the general public’s preexisting beliefs at the top.