You're trying to discredit the USN&WR rankings. That's fine, but almost every school I know puts it right on its website. My point is that it's a logarithmic scale and not linear, and that once past 50 the gap between 51 and 200 is small. It's much smaller than the gap between 1 through 10 or 11 through 40. No one not in the Top 50 is an academic heavyweight. And one poster even suggested the Top 25 only.
I said in one of the posts I made that there are 7 schools in the ACC past 50. I'm not impressed with any of them academically as a whole. They all each individually have some specific majors that score very high. Several of them have very good athletic departments that impress. AAU is nice, but most college athletes are not Graduate Research Assistants, and most college sports fans are more loyal to their Undergraduate Alma Mater than their Graduate Alma Mater. That is the case with me and most I know. Both of my Alma Maters are AAU. In UVA's case since 1904. I never would have known it if the Big Ten wasn't throwing that term around in the latest round of Conference Realignment. How big the research budgets were or how much professors published meant nothing to me. I wanted to get degrees from quality academic institutions that increased the opportunity of getting a decent job out of college. I think USN&WR is a good indicator of places to go to be able to do that. Is it perfect? No.
I actually like this ranking that was done last spring by the Daily Mail in the UK. It ranks Universities by how well they produce the highly successful. UVA finished 11th with 499 individuals. This is the type of list that impresses me. At least some people can take a UVA degree and make something of themselves. I'm not one of the 499, but bravo to who are. All of the names on this list are academic heavyweights. Louisville is not there. I don't think any on this list is past 50 on the USN&WR rankings. This list only goes up to 20.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...eague-college-leads-world-richest-alumni.html