[dtengineering]

I strongly encourage people to take lists such as this about as seriously as they take "the top 1000 songs of all time" or the "top 100 movies of the year" lists. They are, perhaps, good for entertainment and discussion purposes, and there are likely some very good high schools (or songs, or movies) on the list, but summarizing a school based on a few test results and limited demographic information is kind of like summarizing a person based on their final exam scores in English and Math. (I'm not saying this doesn't happen... I'm just saying it is so far from comprehensive as to be essentially irrelevant.)

The US News criteria does attempt to go a bit further than some lists of this nature, by taking into account demographic information of the students, but how they weight these factors and others is purely arbitrary.

So while generating a list like this is good business for US News (heck... I went to their site to look for their criteria) I wouldn't put too much weight on it.

Jason