From Malcolm Gladwell's (author of "Blink" and "The Tipping Point") most recent New Yorker piece, "What College Rankings Really Tell Us…"
There’s no direct way to measure the quality of an institution—how well a college manages to inform, inspire, and challenge its students. So the U.S. News algorithm relies instead on proxies for quality—and the proxies for educational quality turn out to be flimsy at best."