College rankings are a bit like corruption rankings: they are measurements of perceptions. Not only that, perceptions are heavily influenced by previous ranking

College rankings are a bit like corruption rankings: they are measurements of perceptions. Not only that, perceptions are heavily influenced by previous rankings. If your ranking doesn't show Harvard and MIT near the top, it is wrong. If your corruption index doesn't show Scandinavia and Western Europe above Africa and South America, it is wrong. If it's wrong, people will not want to read it. If you do an "objective" ranking and it doesn't quite say what you expected, you need to weight things differently, so that your ranking has credibility. At best you can do a bit of massage to show that you are actually doing something when compiling these rankings, and you might be able to highlight a few trends. But in the end, if you are not showing the usual suspects in the usual places, people will not believe you. Reputation, at the end of the day, moves slowly.