<p>No problem at all, Clinton. And, while I appreciate the apology, there was no need for it. I believe that the misunderstandings arise because most anyone who spends time debating the USNews ends up with some subtle contradictions. </p>
<p>For instance, I believe that USNews contains a number of misleading or counter-productive elements. Of course, that is MY opinion. I understand that for others the same “ingredients” I view with dismay are perfectly acceptable. To give an example, the expected graduation rates that are a direct result of the selectivity indexes assigned values of 99 to Harvey Mudd and (if I remember correctly) 96 to Pomona and Swarthmore. In turn, their lower real graduation rates yielded a substantial penalty. A few years ago, this caused Harvey Mudd to be DEAD LAST in this section since they had a negative 18 (99 versus 81.) I doubt that anyone would find very logical that the most selective LAC is supposed to graduate 99% of its students and maintain one of the the highest difficult program in the engineering in the nation. By the way, Caltech suffered similarly but found its graduation expectation number lowered. </p>
<p>All in all, we end up with this love-hate relationship with USNews. I know that I see plenty of problems, but do not see anything better and more cost-effective that the USNews rankings. I deplore their reluctance to make the ranking more user friendly through self-selected data that would allow the user to change the weights of the columns. I also deplore their lack of interest to weed out the gamers and condone the manipulation of the data by some. </p>
<p>But, in the end, it beats trying to get the data from the school directly and printing hundreds of CDS reports.</p>