> I don’t know if high schoolers use college rankings to decide where they should get educated. I've found that some colleges have a reputation centered around

> I don’t know if high schoolers use college rankings to decide where they should get educated. I've found that some colleges have a reputation centered around specializations, for example biotech, compsci, civil engineering, and so forth. Prospective students make decisions based on this reputation, and it's not difficult to assign a number to that. Whether reputation means anything qualitative is something else entirely, though. More relevant, though, is that students also use a variety of other factors in their decision making. Cost and relative location (ie: distance from home of closest family, distance to place of work after graduating) are high-priority factors, meanwhile student body composition (ie: asian vs white) is another. My point is that companies and people don't make decisions based on a single and opaque number, it's just one of many variables in determining where to go and what to do. The factors I listed above can have numeric values assigned to them, and a single metric can be derived from a combination of these numbers, however that's still somewhat opaque. It may be unfair to assign a number to an entire country, but that doesn't diminish its value. It would be unwise to use a single metric as input for decision making, and again that doesn't diminish the value of that metric. It's just another metric.