How much do USNews college rankings factor into your decision of school choice?

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Even back in 1960, Life quietly placed colleges in de facto academic tiers. USN’s main offense appears to be that they became popular in a similar endeavor.

The Historical Selectivity of Colleges, by SAT Score Tiers

Assumptions are often made regarding the historical strength of selective colleges. By SAT score tiers, this is how some appeared in 1960 (Life Magazine, 3 Oct 1960): Amherst Carleton Columbia Harvard Haverford Princeton Reed Rice Swarthmore Williams Yale Brandeis Brown Chicago Cornell Dartmouth Hamilton Johns Hopkins Lehigh Oberlin Rochester Stanford Antioch Bowdoin Duke Kenyon Michigan Middlebury Northwestern Pennsylvania Iowa Tufts Union UC-Berkeley Sewanee Colgate Denison Grinnell Knox Lawrence Muhlenberg Occidental UColorado Beloit NYU Pittsburgh Southern Methodist Syracuse Virginia Vanderbilt Among other possible observations Women's colleges, as well as technically focused schools, seem to have been myopically omitted by the editors. Smaller colleges comprise the majority of the first tier. Carleton was the strongest school in the Midwest; Reed was the strongest in the far West; Sewanee was competitive with Duke in the South. T…