@Hunt nails it. @xiggi, the data that ARWU uses is indeed more objective and harder to lie about than what USN uses. I’m not sure how you can successfully dispute that. And I don’t see goalpoats being moved. You can say it’s incomplete, biased, whatever, but I’m not saying that it’s complete, unbiased, or The One True Ranking that everyone should use either. As individuals, we should all decide on what is pertinent info. I will say, however, that while I certainly see the positives of a LAC education, there definitely is a correlation between perceptions about how good a school is and its research prowess, for better or worse. This is even more true outside the US (again, for better or worse).
Xiggi’s beef is that a school like Smith has a higher PA score than a school like Harvey Mudd.
FYI, other schools have also submitted bad data to US News in the past including
Claremont McKenna, Bucknell, Emory and George Washington:
http://www.examiner.com/article/is-us-news-responsible-for-selling-bad-data
I am not following your argument at all, Purple, and I am not sure you are offering a sequitur to Hunt’s post.
For the record, I did not say that it was easier to lie about the data used by ARWU and the other similar rankings. My point is that it offers only a partial (as you noted) and biased insight into what is described as “faculty strength” In addition, I have often stated that its relevance to the process of selecting an UG education is strenuous at best.
Fwiw, I completely agree with the notion that candidates should look closely as what appeals to them, and carefully weigh a number of elements. What you call “the One True Ranking” presents many elements worth looking into despite suffering from the attempt to rank them as they do. The ARWU, in turn, presents a very narrow and limited scope that might or might not have any relevance to the life of an undergraduate.
As far as subjective versus objective “ranking elements” I have long been on record that the Peer Assessment should be a reasonable element if it were to be both expanded with clearly defined categories and subject to a full disclosure by the responders. The current methodology and definitions used by the USNews for the peer assessment are so vague that it has turned in nothing else than a popularity contest or a cronyist tool.
The value of the USNews rankings is found in the underlying details. Details that have come much harder to recompile in the new formats.
Well, I think xiggi and Purple Titan are talking past each other a bit–they must be, because I think I agree with both of them. Purple Titan is saying that data elements outside the institution’s control are harder to falsify, and I think that’s true–xiggi is just saying that he questions how valuable publication output is, and I agree with that as well. I think the problem is that there aren’t really any great objective data elements outside the institution’s control that would give us a good idea of the overall quality of the education at the institution.
“It takes about five seconds for the link to open and to read the first sentence. Yes, five seconds gone from your life forever. How annoying!”
Doesn’t matter - you buried the lede. It would have been just as easy to title it “Princeton Review Strips U Missouri - KC of Its Ranking.” It’s like when I have to tell my coworkers to put “(Name) File You Asked For” in their subject lines versus “File You Asked For” in their subject lines which means that everytime I see it, I have to go in and open it to figure out what file it was when just naming it would have made it all easier.
@Hunt nails it again.
I still don’t get the visceral reaction towards ARWU. It is what it is (and what it is is at least objective and non-gameable). You can use it how you like. Same with the subjective PA ranking.
For each kid, it’s going to be different. For a kid who wants a LAC, ARWU is useless. For a kid who has the ability and interest to delve deeply in to a subject (so someone who wants an English uni/grad student-type education), stuff like ARWU’s subject rankings or other subject rankings may be useful. For bragging rights, you can use whatever suits you best. 
And for the vast majority of kids, none of the rankings matter. Dad went to SMU- that’s the holy grail. Mom went to Michigan State- so that’s the top choice. Or a kid is at a Jesuit HS so the rankings start and end at a Catholic university, depending on geography and how good the kids grades and scores are.
I think the number of kids who are going to notice or care that CMU’s share of NIH dollars has increased whereas Rutgers has decreased and therefore your ROI on CMU might be higher than Rutgers even if the sticker price is more (note- I made this up, so no flames on my bogus statistics) is a very small number. And it amuses me no end that the parents of a kid majoring in leisure studies pore over the statistics on PhD production, number of Fulbrights and Marshalls, % of the faculty who serve on sub-committees of the National Endowment for the Arts, etc. (all from their kids college media relations office) like there’s some big halo effect on their kids education.