<p>Chicago’s improving yield is indeed impressive, but it is unlikely to have been at Stanford’s expense. See [Stanford</a> Daily | University braces for large incoming class<a href=“%22Stanford%C2%92s%20yield%20rate%20has%20been%20consistently%20increasing%20from%2064%20percent%20in%202002%20to%20%5Bthe%20class%20of%202016’s%5D%2073%20percent%20rate.%22”>/url</a> It’s likely to go up again this year. So there’s just not many students turning down Stanford for any other school these days, let alone Chicago.</p>
<p>And the top college rankings haven’t really changed over time. Only USN&WR’s methodology has. If you look at academic peer rank Stanford and Harvard have always been at the top, followed closely by Yale, Princeton and MIT (not necessarily in that order). When USN&WR first started their list, they used peer rank as their sole criteria. But it doesn’t sell magazines if you get the same results every year, so they added (and then kept changing) all these other factors. The results then started to diverge, sometimes drastically and illogically, from academic peer rank. For a comparison of peer ranking to the magazine’s ranking for this year see: [url=<a href=“TaxProf Blog”>TaxProf Blog]TaxProf</a> Blog: U.S. News College Rankings: Peer v. Overall](<a href=“http://www.stanforddaily.com/2012/05/14/university-braces-for-large-incoming-class/]Stanford”>http://www.stanforddaily.com/2012/05/14/university-braces-for-large-incoming-class/)</p>
<p>Again, that is not to say Chicago is not great. It has been a great university for a long time. But cracking that final tier will be a continued challenge.</p>