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<p>Really? I had always heard just the opposite. The very first US News college rnaking in 1983 was as follows:</p>
<p>National universities
- Stanford
- Harvard
- Yale
- Princeton
- UC Berkeley
- U Chicago
- Michigan
- Cornell
- U Illinois
- Dartmouth
- MIT
- Caltech
- Carnegie-Mellon
- Wisconsin</p>
<p>Honorable mention:
15. Brown
15. Columbia
15. Indiana U
15. UNC Chapel Hill
15. Rice</p>
<p>That’s 3 publics in the top 10 and 6 publics in the top 19. Also Midwestern schools were well represented at the top, with 3 Midwestern schools in the top 10. I had always heard that it was elite schools in the Northeast–and their fan base–that didn’t like the original ranking which was 100% peer assessment, and it was in response to their complaints that US News started adding input metrics like spending per student, faculty compensation, etc.</p>
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<p>I don’t know where you get that US News was “based in the Midwest.” It was founded by journalist and publisher David Lawrence, a native Philadelphian and Princeton grad who spent most of his professional career in Washington, DC, and as far as I know US News’ editorial offices have always been in DC. Unless you mean their readership base was in the Midwest; that’s possible as it positioned itself as a more conservative alternative to Time and Newsweek, and that editorial posture may have played better in some parts of the Midwest. But probably less so in those population segments in the Midwest most inclined to care about such things as college rankings. And since subsequent changes to the ranking have tended to favor elite private schools, it seems more likely to me that the readership they were pandering to was largely based in the Northeast.</p>