Pushkin

Once upon a time in the middle of the 1980s, when the Cold War still raged,

and a man named Ronald Reagan occupied the White House,

there were three major weekly news magazines in the United States.

Time magazine was number one, with millions upon millions of copies in circulation.

Newsweek was number two, and what news magazine came in third place?

A sleepy little publication based in Washington, D.C., known as US News and World Report.

One of the magazine's managing editors in those years, Peter Bernstein,

remembers the day when everything changed.

It was a very exciting time, I mean, because more had just taken over, there were a lot of people buzzing around.

Mort being Mortimer B. Zuckerman, a Canadian billionaire.

Robot US News and World Report, with dreams of becoming a media baron.

There were a ton of really good ideas, sort of in the magazine, and I think it's fair to say our feeling was that the execution could have been a lot better.

And one of the things we wanted to do was distinguish ourselves from time and newsweek, because we were the third.

And how do you distinguish yourself if you're always coming in third?

If a Canadian billionaire with visions of grandeur is breathing down your neck, you do something audacious.

You create something that no educated parent could possibly ignore.

A scheme to examine every American college and university, and rank them.

From top to bottom.

We were looking to reinvent the magazine, and the college rankings became part of that.

So Bernstein and his colleagues began collecting a mountain of statistics on the universities and colleges of the United States.

To make sense of those numbers, they came up with an algorithm, a secret algorithm that could assign every school a score of one through one hundred regardless of its size or mission or complexity.

...