<p>I heard that it was due to a mistake in self-reporting?</p>
<p>Before everyone jumps on me for being obsessed with rankings, I'm just curious.</p>
<p>It jumped from 15th to 9th in 2007 because the university wasn’t reporting its data correctly. This was a negligence probably based on the university’s historical apathy toward rankings.</p>
<p>They are finally getting closer to being right. They are only off by about 7 spots now. :)</p>
<p>I found this link posted by somebody else. It’s a historical USNWR ranking data up to 2007. Some really interesting stuff: you can tell when CalTech, MIT, Columbia, and UPenn started to game the system: they all show a HUGE jump in a single year.</p>
<p><a href=“http://web.archive.org/web/20070908142457/http://chronicle.com/stats/usnews/[/url]”>http://web.archive.org/web/20070908142457/http://chronicle.com/stats/usnews/</a></p>
<p>This is just yet one more reason why I am rather skeptical about US domestic ranking agencies. That, plus domestic rankings punish outstanding public institutions. Even with the recent woes about some notable examples such as UC Berkeley due to budget issues and what not, they deserve much better recognitions than these agencies give credit for. With the current woes and potentially worsening problems there, don’t know how long they can maintain their outstanding academic standing - it only takes a few years to lose a significant faculty talents, and much harder to build it back up.</p>
<p>hyeonjlee, no such spike exists for Caltech, MIT, and Columbia. The gap is simply due to a change in USNWR’s methodology in the late 80s. Penn, though, has been getting steadily more selective over the years.</p>
<p>As phuriku said, the change in rank was made after Chicago administrators met with USNWR to discuss data reporting.</p>
<p>[U</a> of C jumps to ninth in U.S. News rankings - The Chicago Maroon](<a href=“Get a Life 2-4-05 – Chicago Maroon”>Get a Life 2-4-05 – Chicago Maroon)</p>
<p>[U</a> of C snags no. 9 spot amid U.S. News criticisms - The Chicago Maroon](<a href=“Alcohol bans felt at third of campuses nationwide – Chicago Maroon”>Alcohol bans felt at third of campuses nationwide – Chicago Maroon)</p>
<p>OK. I can see that around 89, there was some major rearrangement of the deck chairs. However, this is not the case with UPenn. Penn’s ranking jumped significantly around 98: this is not a gradual improvement, but rather a stark example of “before” and “after” shots. No other schools have such clean break. So, this is not due to the general rule changes on the part of USNWR. I don’t think the school suddenly became that much better either.</p>
<p>Whichever way we look at it, rankings, in my mind, can be manipulated to a great degree. Granted, a duck will not become a swan overnight. But with enough attention to the fine tuning of the gaming strategy, a lot can be done. I still think the domestic ranking agencies undersell our great public institutions. Just my $0.02.</p>
<p>On a closer examination, the ranking reshuffling that showed on 89 with allegedly new criteria, weight, etc, gave a huge boost to some private schools and just killed elite public universities: Berkeley, U Michigan, and U North Carolina - Chapel Hill, etc that up until then were rated much, much better. (UCLA’s data is missing to compare the rank change, UVA only start with 88 so hard to call a definitive trend with). </p>
<p>I don’t know what it is they instituted as part of the ranking scheme, but this kind of practice certainly does not give a warm and fuzzy feeling.</p>