Flawed rankings?

Here's a trick question: When U.S. News and World Report ranked the 120 best colleges this past summer, guess where they ranked Santa Clara?

The answer: nowhere.

Of these top universities, Santa Clara wasn't even listed. Notable schools ranked include No. 5 Stanford, No. 21 University of California at Berkeley, No. 42 University of California at Davis, No. 52 Pepperdine University and No. 74 University of California at Santa Cruz.

The rankings place an 80 percent emphasis on four factors: retention rates, student selectivity (test scores, top-tier high school proportion and acceptance rate) and faculty resources (class size, student-faculty ratio and full-time professor proportions).

The further you scroll down the list, the more puzzling it becomes that Santa Clara didn't make the cut. Even by U.S. News' standards, Santa Clara should be ranked high: Class sizes and student-faculty ratios are good, and Santa Clara has 92 percent freshman retention rate. There's no way that Santa Clara shouldn't be ranked in the top 50 or above, much less the top 120.

This fallout from these annual rankings should make one wonder if the system itself is fundamentally flawed. The National Opinion Research Center, which is commissioned by U.S. News itself, even makes the disclaimer that such rankings "lack any defensible empirical or theoretical basis."

Yet, that's merely a footnote within a math-oriented ranking system that many readers consider credible.

Prospective students use reports like U.S. News' when researching universities. But should they if these rankings paint an inaccurate picture? Is it fair to trust the very same U.S. News that ranked Santa Clara's masters program No. 2 in the West?

Maybe it is time to re-evaluate these systems, or at least read them with a critical eye before blindly accepting their validity.