The actual paper is pretty interesting, even aside from the more political implications[0]. For faculty placement, their measure of network prestige outpredicts

The actual paper is pretty interesting, even aside from the more political implications[0]. For faculty placement, their measure of network prestige outpredicts other network measures and other ranking systems like USNews (but still only performs modestly well). They also released the data in the supplementals. This is a magnificent hand-curated dataset, especially because it's complete, for each discipline, and it's relatively large. Network measures suffer from sampling issues, so a complete dataset like this is awesome. [0]http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005 http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005.