Indeed. Generic rankings really do not do LACs well. I mean, they do nothing well. But it is even worse with LACs, where the whole point is there are so many distinct approaches that could fit with different students.
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My kids’ former school went up in the rankings for the last four years straight. Within a few hours, there would be an email from the school boasting about the new ranking. This year, it dropped a little, no email.
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What surprised me the most was the fall of Brandeis. They went from about 35 to 60!
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Certain schools are just better at it than others; they’re careful about not expanding too much; pinpointing their place in the market; ensuring the loyalty of key stakeholders (cough, wealthy alum) and smoothing over the waxing and waning of differing tastes among the American public. Wesleyan and Brown are prime examples of this.
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#12 nationally is too low? 
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Assigning numerical scores to some factors and then assigning weights and adding them is just completely arbitrary and makes any rankings like this completely useless.
I don’t think anyone should care about their school falling or rising. As the parent of a college kid, what matters to me is how their experience is at their school. The ranking is completely useless to me now.
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I do kind of feel bad for schools like Wake, Tufts and other really good schools that are not research powerhouses. I think there is something to be said for undergraduate schools that emphasize small class sizes taught by full professors and put less pressure on those professors to produce published research. I tend to think undergraduate students benefit more from being taught by top professors than they do from the research published by those professors. I tend to think the universities and their grad students benefit more from prolific research than their undergraduate students do. I have no bias towards these types of school given my children are at UMich.
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I agree 100%
But this is how a lot of parents react (IRL as well as on these forums):
Their kid’s school rises in a ranking = their school is getting well deserved recognition for all the wonderful things they’re doing.
School falls in a ranking = rankings are clearly flawed, and other schools are being favored on metrics that don’t sense.
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Re: apples and oranges comment. Very true! SLAC top 25 includes a lot of colleges specific to one particular interest, whether based on military service, gender, tech - it is interesting that USNWR lumps them all together when the experience is very different and a bit hard to compare equally.
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Teaching loads vary widely across schools. At teaching intensive colleges, faculty might teach 4 or 5 courses per semester. At research institutions, they typically teach two. Research grants or added administrative responsibilities could reduce the teaching load at any of these kinds of schools. Professors who are on sabbatical still count as teaching faculty, because they go back to teaching after the sabbatical is over. Adjuncts or part-time faculty might teach 8 or 9 courses a semester, but maybe only one or two at a single institution. So trying to figure out who counts as “teaching faculty” and who doesn’t based on how many classes taught is kind of pointless, because the standard for different departments, schools, and academic ranks is so different. If you’re in a classroom, you teach. If you’re a TA, you’re not faculty. That’s about the only generalization we can make across the board.
That said, I agree that class size is a better metric – but it’s one that’s easier for schools to manipulate, so I suppose that’s why it’s no longer a criteria.
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I guess not – it’s packed up there. I’m more puzzled as to how they dropped 7 spots or whatever it was. Columbia, as we know, did not participate – their fall is not as surprising to me.
Columbia rose six spots after not participating!
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Ha – I had forgotten that their initial drop took place last year.
So, now what?
Will schools race to admit as many PELL grant students since this is so important for their ranking?
Will they enlarge their CS and engineering departments since those graduates earn more right out of college?
Will most schools continue to lower classroom standards and give major grade inflation in order to keep their students happy?
Whatever happened to academic rigor and exemplary instruction?
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The only thing I am thinking about related to these rankings is whether I should tease the kid now that my alma mater is ranked higher than hers. 
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Yes UChicago is a T10 school, or at least should be. Reputation just isnt the most important part of the rankings anymore.
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It is very difficult for me to imagine that research expectations at Wake and Tufts are low. Of course, they’re not Harvard-high, but few places are. I teach at a regional teaching intensive university that doesn’t appear in discussions like this one, and I still had to publish to get tenure and promotion. I’m positive that the standards for schools like Wake and Tufts are higher. (And I disagree that undergrads don’t benefit from faculty research, but that’s a very different discussion – except to say that at undergrad-focused institutions, students often get to participate in their professors’ research projects, which is a fantastic opportunity).
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Admitting more Pell grant students and improving their educational outcomes would be a very good thing IMO. Though it seems like the highly ranked (edited from “top” – top will vary from kid to kid!!) privates are already fighting for those students…
Interestingly, I think Chicago’s distinct branding is a double-edged sword, in that it has helped it historically as well. Like, the whole reason we are talking about it like this is the common perception it is a smart school for smart people.
And I note that like Rice and Stanford, it is a relative newcomer–founded (after a false start) in 1890. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Penn, Brown, and Dartmouth were all colonial colleges. Many of the top publics were founded much earlier, and eventually so were Emory, Northwestern, WUSTL, the two most prominent private land-grant universities, Cornell and MIT, Vanderbilt, and Hopkins. Stanford and then Chicago and Rice were relatively late additions in the later part of Gilded Age period.
But basically right from the start, Chicago established its branding as a place for rigorous scholarship. And that really helped drive its march up to the top tiers of public perception.
But then in recent decades, there has been something sometimes called a nationalization trend, where more people are looking outside their region for college. It really took off in the 2000s, but even in that 2004 paper, if you look up Region 3 (which includes, IL, IN, MI, PH, and WI), Chicago is buried way down at 29. Implying it was losing all sorts of cross-admit battles to colleges all over the country by then. It wasn’t a stand out anywhere, but it actually did a bit better in the New England Region 1 (#25), and Mid-Atlantic Region 2 (#26).
So I think this is all consistent with on the one hand, Chicago having a national brand for academic rigor that has long served its reputation well in certain ways, but on the other Chicago having a national brand for academic rigor that is a burden when it comes to winning cross-admit battles in an increasingly nationalized competition.
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My student is at a private school that dropped. They don’t have a huge endowment. Personally I hope they continue to invest in small class sizes, professors with PhD, and the overall undergraduate experience.
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