Improving a School's U.S. News and World Report Ranking

In this paper we analyze the 2002 U.S. News and World Report rankings of universities offering graduate programs in engineering. We show that a reasonably simple model, whose independent variables are derived from the intuitive causal relationships among the various performance sub‐measures, can represent the data. The results can be used to quantify the choice of an efficient policy for improving a school's ranking.