Columbia now Unranked by USNews

[merc81]

@Data10

For example, in one year, USNWR changed their statistical calculations to use normalized statistical variables, as should be standard. However, this caused larger changes in rankings for some colleges, including Caltech shooting up to from #9 to #1,… In the following year USNWR added a “logarithmic adjuster” in the category for which Caltech was most ahead of HYP, and there was talk of some non-voluntary changes in staff. HYP returned to the top 3, ahead of Caltech.

If statistics is treated as a social science (rather than simply as a branch of mathematics), it often makes sense to “collapse” certain values based on relevant (although not strictly mathematical) considerations.