<p>First, your assumption that everybody applies to US universities based on US news rankings or any other rankings, for that matter, is false. Even if they do factor in rankings when choosing colleges to apply to, very few actually decide to go somewhere just because it is ranked higher. </p>
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The question is whether US News has been over-rating Dartmouth all the time because it is commonly regarded as an Ivy League blah blah blah
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<p>This is how US News does their rankings:</p>
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Peer assessment (weighting: 25 percent). The U.S. News ranking formula gives greatest weight to the opinions of those in a position to judge a school's undergraduate academic excellence. The peer assessment survey allows the top academics we consult—presidents, provosts, and deans of admissions—to account for intangibles such as faculty dedication to teaching. Each individual is asked to rate peer schools' academic programs on a scale from 1 (marginal) to 5 (distinguished). Those who don't know enough about a school to evaluate it fairly are asked to mark "don't know." Synovate, an opinion-research firm based near Chicago, collected the data; of the 4,089 people who were sent questionnaires, 58 percent responded.</p>
<p>Retention (20 percent in national universities and liberal arts colleges and 25 percent in master's and comprehensive colleges). The higher the proportion of freshmen who return to campus the following year and eventually graduate, the better a school is apt to be at offering the classes and services students need to succeed. This measure has two components: six-year graduation rate (80 percent of the retention score) and freshman retention rate (20 percent). The graduation rate indicates the average proportion of a graduating class who earn a degree in six years or less; we consider freshman classes that started from 1996 through 1999. Freshman retention indicates the average proportion of freshmen entering from 2001 through 2004 who returned the following fall.</p>
<p>Faculty resources (20 percent). Research shows that the more satisfied students are about their contact with professors, the more they will learn and the more likely it is they will graduate. We use six factors from the 2005-06 academic year to assess a school's commitment to instruction. Class size has two components: the proportion of classes with fewer than 20 students (30 percent of the faculty resources score) and the proportion with 50 or more students (10 percent of the score).</p>
<p>In our model, a school benefits more for having a large proportion of classes with fewer than 20 students and a small proportion of large classes. Faculty salary (35 percent) is the average faculty pay, plus benefits, during the 2004-05 and 2005-06 academic years, adjusted for regional differences in the cost of living (using indexes from the consulting firm Runzheimer International). We also weigh the proportion of professors with the highest degree in their fields (15 percent), the student-faculty ratio (5 percent), and the proportion of faculty who are full time (5 percent).</p>
<p>Student selectivity (15 percent). A school's academic atmosphere is determined in part by the abilities and ambitions of the student body. We therefore factor in test scores of enrollees on the SAT or ACT tests (50 percent of the selectivity score); the proportion of enrolled freshmen (for all national universities and liberal arts colleges) who graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school classes and (for institutions in the universities-master's and comprehensive colleges-bachelor's categories) the top 25 percent (40 percent); and the acceptance rate, or the ratio of students admitted to applicants (10 percent). The data are for the fall 2005 entering class.</p>
<p>Financial resources (10 percent). Generous per-student spending indicates that a college can offer a wide variety of programs and services. U.S. News measures the average spending per student on instruction, research, student services, and related educational expenditures in the 2004 and 2005 fiscal years.</p>
<p>Graduation rate performance (5 percent; only in national universities and liberal arts colleges). This indicator of "added value" shows the effect of the college's programs and policies on the graduation rate of students after controlling for spending and student aptitude. We measure the difference between a school's six-year graduation rate for the class that entered in 1999 and the rate we predicted for the class. If the actual graduation rate is higher than the predicted rate, the college is enhancing achievement.</p>
<p>Alumni giving rate (5 percent). The average percentage of alumni who gave to their school during 2003-04 and 2004-05 is an indirect measure of student satisfaction. To arrive at a school's rank, we first calculated the weighted sum of its scores. The final scores were rescaled: The top school in each category was assigned a value of 100, and the other schools' weighted scores were calculated as a proportion of that top score. Final scores for each ranked school were rounded to the nearest whole number and ranked in descending order. Schools that receive the same rank are listed in alphabetical order. Our rankings of accredited undergraduate business programs and engineering programs are based exclusively on peer assessment data gathered from the programs' deans and senior faculty members.
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<p>I'm not saying US News rankings are the end-all-be-all of rankings. I'm just saying that out of all that are out there, they're by far the most credible. But you're free to choose to believe whatever you wish to.</p>