<p>The US News rankings actually do serve some valid purposes and they are carefully done. However, part of what we’re seeing is that none of the service academies fit well into any traditional category. They don’t fit with national universities because they do not have graduate programs. Putting West Point and Annapolis in the LAC category seems like a mistake, but the fact is that comparatively few cadets at West Point actually major in science or engineering anymore. I believe the last Peterson’s summary I saw of WP said there were more history majors there than engineering. I wouldn’t expect that of Annapolis, but it may be true there also.
USAFA was obviously not placed in a comparable group of colleges. If you go to the US News web site, you’ll see that USAFA is so far ahead of number two in that category that there’s really no comparison at all.
As Soylent pointed out, the academies used to be classified as Bachelor-Degree Engineering Schools. You’d think that would still be the case, but maybe the academies now for the most part are liberal arts colleges with a science-engineering core curriculum. If that’s the case, then there probably aren’t any other comparable civilian colleges in the country.</p>