<p>lagunal-- that’s part of the problem with nearly all of these numbers, they really are garbage in and garbage out.</p>
<p>Make no mistake, while I think USNWR is making a serious effort to do what it can with what data is available, the entire system of rankings are designed to confirm the beliefs of the majority of people. USNWR already knows what people think the list should look like, and in developing their criteria, you can be damn sure they tried to find measures which brought them closest to perception as a way of validating their methodology.</p>
<p>If 2x2= ? is a multiple choice question and I multiply properly to arrive at 4 or I do 2+2= 4, all we know is the results match the correct answer. Since we don’t have any proper “process” to follow here, the model has been designed around outputting the expected, “correct” answer.</p>