I can’t agree with this enough: “good” is relative to the person measuring it. Know what you value and then you can make a list.
Boston has no good schools at all (if you hate winter) and the Ivy league can’t hold a candle to Georgia Tech and Purdue (in engineering.) If you’re a pretty good student who’s going to need a ton of financial aid then your list will be profoundly different from a trust fund kid who needs a proper golf course on campus. You wouldn’t choose your favorite ice cream flavor from a magazine article, so why would you trust one for this?
If you’re worried about having to face a swarm of hyper-competitive “Where are you going?” questions then be very up-front about what you want and why your list is different from USNWR and they will answer themselves: I’m getting to play on a good D3 baseball team, I got a huge Presidential scholarship, it’s 80 degrees in Florida you know, they have a great program that gets me into PT school early, or the awesome I really, really loved the place the minute I arrived. My DD has always wanted to fly and aimed directly at a service academy for years, no explanations needed.