Being surprised that others do not see Brown CS as being less strong than CS at the others listed just shows your ignorance, @lostaccount. (I don’t know much about Brown engineering).
I wouldn’t say that the research-based rankings are stupid. They are what they are and matter more for grad school, but I do agree with the sentiment that using rankings without knowing the criteria they use or being able to tie in why those criteria are important to undergrad education is idiotic.
And yes, the elite privates benefit from being selective and getting good inputs. But that’s true for UPenn and Columbia as well. So explain why both of them do worse than Brown in the outputs-based LinkedIn rankings that I posted.
BTW, my understanding is that JHU CS isn’t bad. JHU is very grad-school-focused, however.