Why don’t the ranking lists show all the rank numbers?
Among the five most popular areas of graduate and professional study – business, education, engineering, law and medicine – U.S. News publishes numbered rankings of the top schools. A school’s rank tells you how many schools garner a higher score on the U.S. News ranking model. Schools that have the same score are listed alphabetically. For example, suppose that a single school scores higher than all others on the U.S. News ranking model. It then has Rank 1. Now suppose that three schools are tied with the second-highest score. Each of those three schools will have Rank 2. Then the next-highest-scoring school will have Rank 5. The fifth-ranked school achieves a third-highest score, but because of the three-way tie among schools achieving the second-highest score, there are four schools that rank higher, so the third-highest-scoring school has Rank 5, not Rank 3. In this example, no school has a rank of 3 or 4. For rankings of specialties within these areas and programs outside of them,
