In case you missed Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece on the U.S. News rankings, I recommend it (for the full story you have to have a subscription). I don’t think the article got the respect it deserves because “everybody knows” that the rankings are flawed; it seemed to be an old story. But in a reflection in Liberty, I glean some of the better bits. Gladwell concludes that the U.S. News system is based on ideological assumptions–such as the irrelevance of price — that are “designed to reward Yale-ness.”