Hiring managers have their own “top” lists. If you’re hiring in aerospace/aviation, you’ve got ERAU. If you’re hiring chemical engineers, you’ve got Missouri S&T. If you’re hiring for the paper industry, you’ve got U Maine. If you run a charter school network looking for education disrupters, you’ve got Bank Street. If you lead a museum and are hiring entry level educators and curators you’ve got Williams. The CC obsession of whether Northeastern has moved up or down three slots… actual grownups who earn a living hiring new grads cannot afford to let a magazine determine their recruiting strategy.
The “published rankings” matter over a long period of time (let’s call it a decade or so). But if your paycheck depends on your skill at hiring new grads who are going to pass each level of the actuarial exams and advance in their profession, you really don’t care what a magazine is telling you about “top tier” schools. Companies measure all sorts of things. Retention- of the X number of new grads we hire, how many are still here after two years, how many have been promoted after three, etc. Mobility- how many of them were eligible for/agreed to transfer, and had developed the skills we needed to be useful in a different division, region, country? These metrics are mostly divorced from whatever the lists or listicles have to say.
And that explains UIUC in CS, explains why companies don’t care if a particular university is ABET accredited in a particular engineering discipline, etc. If every hire you’ve made in the last decade from Cal Tech has been a standout- performance, longevity, retention, value creation, etc.- it’s going to take a LOT to get you to give up hiring from Cal Tech!