Sox, you’ve made a lot of really misguided arguments over the past months, but this one is, perhaps, your silliest.
Even if we were to grant you that in terms of importance Temple sits at 121, you seem to omit the denominator of that equation, namely, that there are over 4,100 colleges and universities in the US, putting Temple in the top 3%.
However, the reason that’s a terrible metric is the college rankings on USN&WR are concerned with things like undergraduate acceptance rate, average class size, amenities on campus, and so on. It has nothing to do with the quality of research output. For instance, notable schools below Temple: University of Kentucky (T-129), New School (T-135), and George Mason University (T-135) are all well-known for their research output, but schools like Leigh University (T-40), Miami University (T-76), and Northeastern University (T-42) are awesome places for a liberal arts education, but contribute little to scholarly research. This is why other scholarly metrics, like having research published in increasingly well-respected peer-reviewed journals, is a better indicator of the quality of the program. And seeing as the team at Temple has the highest-placed articles on the topic at hand, I think we still get to use 'prestigious'. USN&WR doesn’t care about the reputation of the physics department beyond that they keep their class sizes at 19:1 and that the lawns outside their building are well manicured.
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