These types of rankings are as good as the data they are fed. Here, the data is pub count. This is clearly useful to see - for example, if you want to go somewh

These types of rankings are as good as the data they are fed. Here, the data is pub count. This is clearly useful to see - for example, if you want to go somewhere and study operating systems, but the school has not published a paper in that area in the past decade, well, you might want to rethink your decision. That said, we need better data. Imagine top programs each doing a detailed survey of exiting graduate students to learn things like (a) how easy was it to find an advisor? (b) once you had an advisor, how much did you feel like they helped you in your career development? etc. etc. If there was a serious effort to evaluate the outcome of graduate school -- the graduate students themselves, and how much they improved while in school -- we'd have a new data source and deeper way to evaluate which school one might wish to join.