<p>I don’t believe this is a serious question, but I’ll give it a serious answer. There are good reasons and not-so-good reasons that Columbia is ranked as highly as it is in US News. (I’m less familiar with the Forbes ranking methodology, so I’ll leave that one aside).</p>
<p>Good reasons:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Columbia is a very wealthy university with a very large endowment ($7.6 billion in 2012, good for 8th place). This allows it, inter alia, to recruit and retain outstanding faculty and to spend far more per student than most other colleges and universities, for example by providing numerous small classes and relatively few large classes.</p></li>
<li><p>Columbia recruits and retains outstanding faculty, which makes it highly respected among its peer institutions who give it a very high PA score of 4.6 (out of 5).</p></li>
<li><p>It is even more highly regarded by HS GCs, who give it a 4.8 (out of 5). This matters because those GCs are influential in steering some very talented students to Columbia.</p></li>
<li><p>Columbia attracts some outstanding students, giving it high marks for selectivity.</p></li>
<li><p>Columbia has very high freshman retention (99%) and graduation rates (96% within 6 years).</p></li>
<li><p>Columbia has many small classes (80.6% with fewer than 20 students) and relatively few large classes (7% with 50 or more students). In comparison, at Princeton 11% of the classes have 50 or more students, and at Stanford that figure is 12%. This is widely underappreciated, but once a school gets above 10% or so large classes, students are likely to be spending as much or more time in large classes than in small ones. That’s so because by definition each large class is large, containing many students, and each small class is small, containing only a few students; you can’t just compare the percentages of each type of class, you need to count up the student-hours spent in each type, and those add up much faster in the large classes than in the small ones. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>Not-so-good reasons:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Columbia spends a lot of money because it needs to, given its location in New York City. Perhaps the clearest example is faculty salaries: Columbia pays very high faculty salaries in part because it can, but in part because it needs to do so if it wants to attract and retain high-quality faculty, given the high cost of living in New York City. The average full professor at Columbia makes $212,300 per year, according to the AAUP. At Harvard the comparable figure is $203,000; Princeton $200,000; Penn $187,000; Yale $186,300; Dartmouth $167,400; Brown $160,800; Cornell $159,800. Columbia in effect is rewarded in the US News rankings for having high costs due to its high cost location.</p></li>
<li><p>Columbia is disingenuous with its entering class stats. It reports SAT medians only for students in Columbia College and SEAS (engineering). It does not report SAT scores for undergrads in its College of General Studies, even though General Studies students take exactly the same classes as Columbia College/SEAS students, with the exception of a couple of classes in the Columbia College “core.” Also, Barnard College is part of Columbia University but Barnard College SAT medians are reported separately and are not included in the Columbia University totals, even though Barnard students may also take any class at Columbia except for some Columbia “core” courses. The point of rewarding a college in the rankings for high SAT medians is said to be that a talented student will get a better educational experience if s/he is in a class of similarly talented students. That purpose is defeated if a school like Columbia reports the SAT scores of only a fraction of the students in its classrooms.</p></li>
<li><p>A big part of the reason for Columbia’s current popularity and selectivity is that New York City is currently seen as a highly desirable place to be. This inflates demand for seats at Columbia and NYU, arguably out of proportion to any educational advantages they may offer. This was not always the case. In the 1970s New York City became very unfashionable because crime rates were higher, and Columbia in particular was perceived to be in a dangerous location. It’s good for Columbia, good for New York, and arguably good for the nation that New York City is “back.” But these things tend to be cyclical. Columbia’s trendiness may one day diminish, without major changes in educational fundamentals. To the extent Columbia is riding a wave of trendiness, part of its lofty ranking might be superficial and fleeting.</p></li>
</ol>