@brembs @neuralreckoning @MarkHanson @jonny It's not exactly what Dan remembers (and probably a different article), but this article has a number of quotes going into that direction (re U.S. News university ranking), e.g.:

> That is one of the most distinctive features of the U.S. News methodology. Both its college rankings and its law-school rankings reward schools for devoting lots of financial resources to educating their students, but not for being affordable. Why? Morse admitted that there was no formal reason for that position. It was just a feeling. “We’re not saying that we’re measuring educational outcomes,” he explained. “We’re not saying we’re social scientists, or we’re subjecting our rankings to some peer-review process. We’re just saying we’ve made this judgment. We’re saying we’ve interviewed a lot of experts, we’ve developed these academic indicators, and we think these measures measure quality schools.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/02/14/the-order-of-things