I believe that’s been done and reported before on College Confidential. Yes, I think the result would be as Uniwatcher describes in #125 (“the rankings would tilt further toward private elites”). You can observe a similar effect in a ranking based on SAT scores alone:
http://www.stateuniversity.com/rank/sat_75pctl_rank.html
The mere fact that it would “tilt” more toward private elites doesn’t necessarily make it wrong. It would be wrong if the USNWR peer assessment truly captures important insights about undergraduate institution quality that are missed by all the other metrics combined. If that is the case, then it ought to be possible to isolate at least one or two objective metrics that corroborate the “correcting” tilt of the peer assessments.
What are those metrics? What objective measurements clearly show the same “correcting” effect (the same counter-tilt)? Averaging the USNWR department rankings would not be a very good example (since those rankings are based entirely on subjective peer assessments, and usually are focused on graduate programs.)