What metric is that? USNWR doesn’t directly measure “academic quality”, but they includes some measures that are probably correlated such as financial resources per student, faculty salary, and admin “marginal” / “distinguished” survey. If you are referring to the latter, note that the admins are rating other colleges, rather than the academic quality of their own. This is problematic on many levels. I expect few are experts on the academic quality of the 200+ other colleges on the list, so many just go by general feel, which is often influenced by the other colleges’ current USNWR ranking. Some may try to sabotage competitor’s rankings.