<p>RML – US News isn’t ranking these universities “as an institution”. It’s ranking them in the only apples-to-apples way that is possible, the portion of them that compete against one another to educate undergraduates, where they are at least reasonably comparable. (Not that I agree with US News on the rankings, but that’s a different story.)</p>
<p>At the college level, a lot of the differences between the institutions become less relevant. You don’t have to consider the effect of owning a hospital (Stanford, Yale, Chicago) vs. owning a whole bunch of them (Penn) vs. not owning one (Harvard) vs. being in a partnership (Columbia) vs. not even having a medical school (Princeton). You don’t have to weigh the relative merits of government schools vs. divinity schools vs. music schools, or small business and law / large engineering (Stanford) vs. big business and law / small engineering (Harvard). If you were looking at whole institutions, places like Princeton, Dartmouth, and Caltech would be more or less out of the running, because they are so much smaller than the others. When you just look at undergraduate education, however, that’s not an issue.</p>