John: Alas, whatever accountability the US News system creates does not extend to educational results. Mike Lowrey and I examined the US News criteria in this paper and found that whether a school’s graduates have learned anything has nothing to do with its ranking. Most students will learn more about economics at, say, Hillsdale College than they will at Harvard, but because Hillsdale concentrates on instruction rather than the bells and whistles of academe, it’s never going to look good under the US News system. My beef with US News is that it encourages school administrators to concentrate on irrelevancies and ignore the real purpose of higher education.