People criticizing that the University of Chicago is gaming the rankings just makes me laugh, because it sounds like naiveté. Don’t many colleges do the same? (Seriously, people are saying that schools are deliberately lowering their acceptance rates to game the system when the acceptance rate, at least for usnews, is like 1.25% of the algorithm??)
Also, UChicago shows up pretty high in many rankings, not just one. If a college were to game a ranking, perhaps it would only be able to do so for one, and even gaming that ‘one’ ranking takes years of hard work, (read the Northeastern University article on how they gamed the usnews rankings) and after all of their years of hard work, NEU finally managed to show up on the usnews list, however, NEU’s ability to show up on another ranking is another story.
When an institution is consistently high or low in multiple rankings, then that’s telling, and UChicago consistently shows up on numerous rankings.
I’m not dissing schools that are ranked lower or not ranked at all, because everyone should have access to education, I’m just pointing out that it’s a joke when people say schools are gaming the rankings, as if there were only one list to game.
But yeah, USNWR is pretty authoritative.