https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-us-news-calculated-the-rankings
We are dealing with a multi variable calculation with a “weighting” step, as well as “normalization” and “transformation” steps that are not specified. To create the “transformation” to a 100 point scale, I believe that each school’s score is expressed as a percentage of the highest score. Since the highest score can change from year to year, an individual school’s score can also change from year to year- even if none of its underlying indicators have changed.
This means that we need to be careful when drawing conclusions based on year-to-year comparisons of any particular school’s scores based on the change of a single variable - because other variables and the scale itself could have changed.