Also, more than that these rankings should weigh much more on the quality of education rather than the research outcome because a large mass of college students are misguided through these rankings. Is it the responsibility of these ranking systems or the students themselves to be more careful? I am not sure. Another way to tackle this is to have different kind of rankings- say, Research rankings, Teaching quality rankings- following more objective metrics rather than opinion based, as arethuza mentioned in his anecdote.