“I think if you look at the original U.S. News undergrad rankings from the mid-'80s, these recent grad aggregate rankings are really quite close! It’s like it strips away many recent changes in undergrad metrics, and you’re left with… solid and deep academic departments that really don’t change all that much from year to year.”
That’s correct anhydrite, universities take decades to change, which is why the USNWR ranking is so absurd. Universities leaping 30, 40, even 50 spots in a mere decade is laughable.
Gerhard Casper, Stanford president in the 1990s, wrote this back in 1996.
"I am extremely skeptical that the quality of a university - any more than the quality of a magazine - can be measured statistically. However, even if it can, the producers of the U.S. News rankings remain far from discovering the method. Let me offer as prima facie evidence two great public universities: the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and the University of California-Berkeley. These clearly are among the very best universities in America - one could make a strong argument for either in the top half-dozen. Yet, in the last three years, the U.S. News formula has assigned them ranks that lead many readers to infer that they are second rate: Michigan 21-24-24, and Berkeley 23-26-27.
Such movement itself - while perhaps good for generating attention and sales - corrodes the credibility of these rankings and your magazine itself. Universities change very slowly - in many ways more slowly than even I would like. Yet, the people behind the U.S. News rankings lead readers to believe either that university quality pops up and down like politicians in polls, or that last year’s rankings were wrong but this year’s are right (until, of course, next year’s prove them wrong). What else is one to make of Harvard’s being #1 one year and #3 the next, or Northwestern’s leaping in a single bound from #13 to #9? And it is not just this year. Could Johns Hopkins be the 22nd best national university two years ago, the 10th best last year, and the 15th best this year? Which is correct, that Columbia is #9 (two years ago), #15 (last year) or #11 (this year)?"
http://web.stanford.edu/dept/pres-provost/president/speeches/961206gcfallow.html
His comment about Cal and Michigan belonging to the top half dozen universities in the nation certainly seems to match the link you posted above that provides the average national department rank (Cal #2 and Michigan #6). It also seems to match the general sentiment of the academic community. Of course, there are several other factors that determine the strength of a university, such as resources, wealth, facilities, intellectual vibe, vitality of the student population, curriculum etc…but the gap between Cal and Michigan’s academic strengths and the US News undergraduate rankings is impossible to justify without the help of a flawed methodology, fuzzy math, inconsistent reporting methods and inaccurate/manipulated data. Ranking Cal out of the top 10 and Michigan out of the top 15 automatically discredits any ranking.