Yes, I agree that students' perception of how others would rank colleges is a serious factor that probably goes into their decision process. This type of rankin

Yes, I agree that students' perception of how others would rank colleges is a serious factor that probably goes into their decision process. This type of ranking will tend to reflect all of those factors that go into the students' decisions. Using just the data that we and US News make public, one could probably do a pretty interesting adjustment for US News rank. (We publish the Elo points for each college, so you wouldn't be limited to just rank-based methods.)