<p>Also, about that time Columbia and NYU gamed the rankings by intentionally cutting their class size and thus admit rate to boost their rankings. (Before that it was always Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and then UChicago–from a prestige point of view, though UChicago frequently outpublished all of them, which is another way of ranking faculty.)</p>
<p>How important are the rankings?</p>
<p>UChicago was founded in 1892 and by 1915, when the first known University ranking was conducted UChicago was #2 in the U.S. – the fastest rise ever by any university – but nobody outside academia knew it (because these rankings were scholarly works, not published by a major news magazine like U.S. News.)</p>
<p>[HathiTrust</a> Digital Library - American men of science; a biographical directory. … 2nd 1910](<a href=“http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015039431930;page=root;seq=607;view=1up;size=100;orient=0;num=593]HathiTrust”>http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015039431930;page=root;seq=607;view=1up;size=100;orient=0;num=593)</p>
<p>[HathiTrust</a> Digital Library - American men of science; a biographical directory. … 2nd 1910](<a href=“http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015039431930;page=root;seq=603;view=1up;size=100;orient=0;num=689]HathiTrust”>http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015039431930;page=root;seq=603;view=1up;size=100;orient=0;num=689)</p>
<p>(From James Cattell’s “American Men of Science.” Although mainly a biographical dictionary, Cattell groups his names by institution, beginning with the 2nd edition in 1910. Therefore there was an immediate tendency to rank the schools according to the number of ‘leading men’ in each field they had produced.)</p>
<p>UChicago’s position as one of the top two universities in the U.S. was confirmed by the first outright University ranking in 1925 by Raymond Hughes and again confirmed in his 1934 ranking:</p>
<p>[HathiTrust</a> Digital Library - Report of Committee on graduate instruction.](<a href=“http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015062738482;page=root;view=image;size=100;seq=4]HathiTrust”>http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015062738482;page=root;view=image;size=100;seq=4)</p>