I worry less about the ranking and more about the finances. Forbes also has a financial health grading system for private colleges which is one way to get a quick look: The Strongest And Weakest Colleges In America — Behind Forbes 2022 Financial Grades. And the grades are not correlated with USNWR ranks. For instance, Fisk and Hampden-Sydney both have an A- financial health grade, while U. of Richmond and Santa Clara have a B. Additionally, I’d try and pull multiple years’ worth of data to see in which direction the school is trending.
In the thread about closing schools (Rest in Peace: College Closings), I think some of the general thoughts have been to take a close look at the finances of schools with an endowment of less than $100 million (not to necessarily eliminate them, but to take a close look).
Those would be two ways that I’d start to get a better sense of the institution’s future, at least for the amount of time that my kid would be in school.
Also, Jeff Selingo’s list of college buyers and sellers would be an interesting data point to consider as well. If a school is an extreme buyer (i.e. really big discounts for the majority of its students), and it doesn’t have a good financial health grade or a not so big endowment, then alarm bells would probably start going off.
All in all, I probably wouldn’t look at any one factor in isolation, but try and get a more global sense of what direction the school is heading in.