Yet in my economics undergrad class on the other side of the world in the 1980s, we all knew about Chicago!…while some of those other names you mention here other than HYP were unfamiliar.
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While I know that this is still true among the “people that matter,” my kids and their friends actually use Niche the most when looking at colleges. I think it’s a little more user friendly to cell phone users 
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I have gone through the other college rankings too! To be honest, these rankings are good reference points for preparing the preliminary list of colleges and navigating the admission process. At the end, the comfort level of the prospective students and the financing of the education remain the most key factors.
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I expect rankings are big among many people who choose to visit a website related to selective college admission, but many among the general population use a very different method for college selection, with an emphasis on local colleges and many out of area colleges being unfamiliar, even if they are ranked well on USNWR.
For example, I attended a basic public HS in upstate NY. The most common choices by far were one of the upstate NY SUNYs or one of the 2 nearby community colleges. I expect only a small minority applied to a private college or out of state college. I lived roughly at the midpoint of all 8 Ivies by distance, but Ivies as a whole did not get a large number of applications, with one exception. More students applied to the upstate NY Ivy (Cornell) than all other Ivy+ colleges combined. Most students had heard of Harvard… many Yale and Princeton too, but few students applied. The upstate NY tech schools, such as RPI, received far more attention than MIT. I once mentioned Harvey Mudd, and even among high achieving honors kids, not a single person had heard of it. I was likely the only person in my class who applied to Stanford. When I mentioned that I was attending Stanford, one my relatives thought I was talking about Stamford, Connecticut.
I expect very few students from this type of group follow changes in USNWR ranking or which college is ranked among T## on USNWR. Much more influential were things like location, and knowing friends and persons in the community who attended that college.
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This topic comes up a lot.
Most people aren’t on CC. They don’t care about lists and have only heard of a few colleges, most of which are near them. Maybe HYP, plus a few of the big football schools. I went to high school in an ordinary suburb of LA. No one I knew applied out of state. Prestige was USC or UCLA. Most of us went to CC or Cal States, including me.
Really, these lists matter to very few people, yet here we all are 
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Vanderbilt has always been on my radar because I love Robert Penn Warren. But then when my oldest was applying to schools, I realized that it turns out Vanderbilt isn’t known for being a hotbed of modernist poetry anymore and didn’t even suggest it to him. Then it returned to our radar with my next two because it has a music school. My Vandy kid is really much more a Blair kid than a Vandy kid.
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The world ranking list gets updated over the summer. Here is the list of '24-'25 rankings:
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/rankings
Ha. One of my American classmates at Cambridge said his relatives thought he was going to some “lesser” (I guess vs Harvard & MIT) college in Cambridge MA when he told them he was going to grad school there.
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My two cents is many US colleges have gotten “better” in absolute terms over recent decades. But rankings are not really suitable for capturing such an effect. Like, if all of colleges 1, 2, 3 . . . N improve in absolute terms, none may change their rankings.
Some of the ways they have gotten “better” are fairly easy to show (although not necessarily uncontroversial, hence the scare quotes).
For example, the pool of applicants to colleges grew dramatically up to around 2010 or so (and the more national colleges have continued to see growth since then despite the relative stagnation in the total domestic pool). But most colleges did not scale up proportionately in enrollment. This allowed many of them to get increasingly selective. So if you care about going to a college where the other students had to get through a very selective process, the more selective the better, many colleges really have gone up by such a measure over recent decades.
A lot of colleges also got a lot wealthier in various ways. A controversial part of this is many increased costs of attendance in real terms (although mostly they just sort of kept up with upper middle class incomes, but those also increased in real terms). In recent years this dynamic has changed, with many actually coming down in terms of at least real average net cost, but from a much higher level.
But they got wealthier in other ways too. Vanderbilt is a good example. Its endowment has gone up WAAAAAY more than inflation (looks like approximately 7 times in real terms since I was applying to college). Some colleges also now get a lot more in research grants, and so on.
All this money can help buy nice things that students value. Nicer dorms, new facilities and labs, funding for all sorts of activities, and so on. Again, there are a lot of controversies in how universities spend their money, but there is SOOOO much more money available at these colleges that some is bound to translate into things many kids will value.
So I have zero doubt there are all sorts of ways in which Vanderbilt is more valuable to many kids today than it would have been if it had remain the same as it was back when I was applying to college.
But Vanderbilt is very much not alone, so again rankings don’t really capture that effect.
Ties, in a statistical sense, tend to be inflationary. That is, all schools but one in a group of tied schools have their ranking positions increased by this policy of U.S. News. Ties cannot lower the ranking of a school. As a footnote to this, at an earlier time USN did not place schools in ties.
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I don’t think these rankings matter much to your typical student, nor do I think they are necessarily an arbiter of quality. Every school in the top 100 or so can provide an excellent education - the very top privates (Harvard et al) will provide a little something more on top of that in terms of facilities, connections and prestige.
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I didn’t realize Duke’s endowment per student was a key USNWR metric and I had thought that Duke was a top notch Ivy League safety school particularly for Northeast (the Boston - Wash DC corridor) students.
I was aware of Duke’s superiority to the Ivy League bottom dwellers (Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell) but now Duke is rated higher than UPenn and Columbia. To me that is very impressive and indicates the school has outstanding leadership
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“Ivy League bottom dwellers”? Hardly And Duke has never been a safety school for anybody.
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I don’t think any of that really reflects Duke’s positioning at any point in its recent history.
Although founded much earlier, what was then called Trinity College got lots of infusions of money from the late 19th into the early 20th Century from wealthy industrialists, not least the Duke family (hence the eventual name change). The conscious purpose was to make the college into a rival of Harvard and Yale but located in the South, and in many ways this mirrored what was going on with colleges like Chicago and Stanford at the time. As an example, they built the core of the Collegiate Gothic campus as a sort of very public demonstration of their wealth. They also added engineering in this period, and eventually created a separate engineering school.
By the start of the 1990s, Duke was well-established as the top private university in the South. It also had started distinguishing itself in sports from most of its academic rivals (aside from Stanford and Northwestern), particularly basketball. It was therefore one of those colleges that could be some kid’s top choice, indeed even if they were outside the South but wanted that sort of serious sports experience combined with academic excellence. I do think that, say, a Columbia or Chicago was seen as a more rigorous school academically, but that did not make it a less valued school for many kids who were perfectly fine trading off a measure of academic rigor for what they perceived as a much more fun school.
That said, has there ever been a time that HYP students have not snarked about other colleges being “safety schools”? Heck, HYP students will do that to each other. The reality, though, is Duke has been a highly valued school all through the US News era, and a favorite of some who liked its particular location, sports, or so on.
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Not exactly. But not exactly not. I know a kid whose college list had exactly 3 schools on it: MIT, Princeton, and our state flagship (not #204, but definitely not one of the public schools that anybody swoons over.) He was not accepted at either MIT or Princeton, so is at our in-state college…where I would argue he is getting an excellent education. The math professor he is doing research under actually collaborates with a professor at MIT. But maybe that MIT professor ends each phone call by thinking to himself what an un-excellent non-peer his collaborator is?
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Well, since you brought up this scenario, if that math professor at this state school was offered a job at the same level at MIT, would they consider that a lateral career move?
Also, is it your argument that if one MIT professor collaborates with one professor at another school, that entire school automatically becomes an equal to MIT in every way?
With respect to Duke, I have long had them in a peer group with Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Hopkins, and Northwestern.
Let’s assume that’s a rhetorical question and return to topic.
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I wish more top kids wanted a liberal arts education would put Carleton at the top of their lists. A better education is not to be had, and with climate change (a real and apocalyptical happening) Minnesota winters just fine these days.
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It’s all STEM or nothing…the skewing of an education into purely those fields is what has driven these changes.