<p>Do I smell another fruitless debate about college rankings? Count me in!</p>
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<p>Or it means that the ranking is not meant to distinguish among the top colleges. I suspect that the top liberal arts colleges score very similar on measures like graduation rate and alumni salaries, which means that small annual fluctuations (and there will be fluctuations when a college graduates only 300-600 students per year) can easily shuffle that group. </p>
<p>However, the rankings might be quite stable and meaningful on a larger scale. Given that there are about 2,000 four-year colleges in the US, moving 10 spots up or down the ranking really constitutes only a 0.5% change - not my definition of volatile.</p>