"Three Reed College undergraduates have challenged the system used by U.S. News & World Report to rank colleges – at the same time as the magazine has challenged the accuracy of five colleges’ rankings.
The story of the Reed students has to do with the college’s decision, in 1995, not to cooperate with U.S. News. The college provides all publicly available data but beyond that does nothing to help U.S. News. This decision forces U.S. News to consider where Reed, a well-respected liberal arts college, would appear in the rankings if it did participate.
Consider the story in Reed Magazine. Three undergraduates – Bailee Cruger, Huaying Qiu and Wenxin Du – in a statistics class examined how U.S. News treats Reeds and the few other colleges that completely abstain from the rankings.
They determined that if U.S. News followed it own formula, Reed would rank No. 36, not No. 90.
https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2019/07/29/reed-students-challenge-us-news-formula