I appreciate that - thanks.
For anyone who wants to know what I mean by a popularity contest vs. using actual data such as acceptance rate or salary or % employed, etc, here is the methodology:
Each qualifying school or program was sent two peer assessment surveys.
An average peer assessment score was calculated for each program using a trimmed mean, which removes the two highest and two lowest scores to reduce the impact of outliers. Programs with at least 10 ratings after trimming were then ranked in descending order based on this score.
Programs with an average score below 2.0 (1.5 for computer science) are grouped alphabetically in a ranking range rather than receiving a specific numerical rank. These schools can request their numerical rank by emailing official@usnews.com.