regardless USC is still a pretty good University for Engineering. I think data rigging is a common practice in many university, not that they submit wrong data like USC did, but they play with the engineering budget, decrease class size for mid-sized class, but increase class size to 70+ for big 50-60 people class. Even peer review and employer review can be manipulated with good
PR team or simply increase your department size so obviously there's more students to hire and 20 good professor may seem stronger than 3 great ones.
as someone who's goin insane studying 3 courses of stochastic process and probability right now in summer. i can tell you that without a good instinctive reasonning and human understand, most rank based on analysis with a bunch of data are just meaningless...