<p>The schools with the highest USNWR rankings generally do have high per capita endowments ([College</a> Endowment Rankings](<a href=“http://www.statisticbrain.com/college-endowment-rankings/]College”>College Endowment Rankings - Statistic Brain)). It is expensive to offer small classes, high salaries to attract the best faculty, generous aid to the strongest applicants regardless of where they come from, minimal “self help” aid to hold down student debt, and enough classes to ensure most students can graduate on time.</p>
<p>Forbes and stateuniversity.com are two other college rankings. Even though each of these 2 rankings and USNWR uses a somewhat different set of criteria, all 3 place well-endowed private schools in most of the top 50 slots. Another interesting approach is the National Survey of Student Engagement. It examines details such as how many 5-page, 10-page, or 20-page papers are assigned per term, or how much interaction students have with faculty. Unfortunately, many famous/popular schools have not been surveyed yet. Of the results I’ve seen, small private LACs (such as Hendrix, Earlham, Beloit, or Centre) seem to score significantly higher than big public universities (such as Michigan, Wisconsin, UIUC, or Minnesota).</p>
<p>Some other ranking methods yield better results for public universities. 8 of the top 10 national universities in The Washington Monthly rankings are state schools. WM considers “social mobility” and “service” (including ROTC and Peace Corps participation rates), as well as “research” factors.</p>
<p>If you wanted to construct a data-driven, exclusively academic ranking that puts state universities in a good light, you could use bibliometric techniques to measure research output (counting faculty publications or journal citations). This approach is used in the NRC graduate department rankings, which do show high “research” ranks for many state universities in many fields.</p>
<p>So all these rankings differ with respect to “the mechanics of where they place schools”. I don’t think that means they are all arbitrary or contradictory. It just means there are many perspectives on college quality. Pick the ones that work for you … or none of them.</p>