<p>I am on repeated record of regarding the US News ratings as not adequate to line the cage of dyspeptic parrot. Somewhere in the dusty archives is TheDad’s College ratings, which had a coherent [but masked] algorithm that wasn’t completely absurd and yet which demonstrated the foolishness of arbitrary rankings. There were, as I recall, five steps to produce the rankings. Step #5 was: If Harvard not equal 1, then set Harvard = 1 and increment all other rankings by 1.</p>