How U.S. News Collects Data: Common Data Set

Ranking system

I question the accuracy and even the editing of the U.S. News, college rankings. While reviewing colleges I noticed in several instances that colleges that had as high as a 97% acceptance rate were rated "less selective" and some colleges with 70-75% acceptance rates were rated "least selective" does this make any sense? Also I was surprised to see that many SUNY schools here in the Northeast area that are/were known "party hard schools" with mediocre at best academics about 10+ years ago are now rated Tier 1 schools? It is possible that they did make major turnarounds. It does seem that there are now a massive number of so-called tier 1 schools now with their new rating parameters (the elimination of Tier 2. Another thought if you (US News) eliminated tier 2, why not eliminate tier 3 and tier 4 using your same logic and just have your top tier and your bottom tier? In conclusion the rating system is certainly better than nothing and the top schools (ivy league and those close behind) are represented here. However I have less faith in many of the other school ratings and endowments I feel are given too much weight. I realize that large university/college endowments do represent alumni satisfaction or perhaps affluence to an extent, I disagree that they are necessarily an indicator of a quality educational program. That being said I think there should be more emphasis on smaller class sizes and student to teacher ratios, which is certainly conducive to an ideal learning environment.