As my Post colleague Nick Anderson wrote, the release of the rankings comes with new complaints about the methodology, as well as a growing number of competitors that evaluate schools with different criteria than U.S. News. The 2023 list came out just a few months after U.S. News knocked Columbia University out of its No. 2 ranking among national universities after the accuracy of its data came into question. U.S. News famously uses as part of its calculations the results of a survey of higher education leaders asked about their views of schools’ reputations. Anderson reported that the response rate now is 34 percent. A full 20 percent of a school’s “reputation” factors into its ranking.