Michigan ranked #21 in new USNews Rankings, highest all-time

Some professions require intense educational training and others are more suited for on the job training, and yet the vast majority have the same educational requirements. I blame it on HR departments and misdirected maternal energy putting unrealistic emphasis on credentials and resumes as a way to weed out applicants and make their jobs easier. Both of us- likely representing vastly different vocations- could be correct. It all depends on what you decide to study in college.

I don’t know how old you are or what field you are in, but in my experience the older you get the more you begin to appreciate qualities in addition to raw intellect and processing speed as drivers of success and achievement in most fields or functions that have multi-dimensional elements to them. Raw IQ/test scores or GPAs can be necessary but not sufficient conditions for success. But, outside of highly academic or technical disciplines, being relatable, having humility and listening skills, open-mindedness, grit, and sincerity are at least as important as brains because the world is one big network and the better conduit you are, the more likely you are to serve as a trusted node.  The smartest people don’t have monopoly on this prowess. 

At the end of the day, you are both measuring different things. You're also taking anecdotes and using them as generalizations about the types of students are respective institutions of higher education. 

But why is that? Surely--if you're so smart--you know that may not only be a result of their high test scores and GPAs. 

To buttress this. When I got out of college, I wanted to work in publishing. Friends sent me to the Beacon Hill, Boston office of the (then) most eminent book reviewer in the country, a friend of theirs. When I asked how he got into publishing, he was honest. "When I graduated from Harvard, my father took me to lunch to meet the editor of the NY Times." 

I got a lot of work myself on the strength of being an M grad, of people I studied with, etc. Yeah, I was smart--a poor kid who got a Michigan Competitive Scholarship (no longer offered, alas), who would not have gone to Michigan without that boost. (I was so happy I got out of bed and remembered to walk down the road to Huron High School to take the test that morning, I can't tell you. Because my divorced and distracted dad wasn't going to provide that function.) 

But to think that the many, many contacts and rep that came with the sheepskin weren't part of the whole iterative context of my successes/opportunities to fail would just be bunk. . . I see SO MANY smart people denied opportunities now. So many young people who know--at 20--that they're never going to own a house, be able to retire, find very gratifying work. . . To sit and pretend that everyone who's succeeding is doing it because they had the opportunity to take tests, prep, whatever, because they're innately superior. . . courts essentialist silliness to ask people to swallow. And from what I see currently in this country, they're not swallowing.  

You're conflating MDs/graduate degrees with undergraduate degrees. You're also conflating those who made it to the top of their field with the average undergraduate from an institution.

And there's a bit of field conflation here. You don't get into Stanford medical school without crushing your undergrad experience academically, which in the sciences equates to a ton of hard work/time and experience with lab research. But Stanford medical school draws students from a large range of universities...

The majority of the wealthier business people I know got 3.0s at whichever state university was local to them.

If it were 1500 random data points, sure, but that's not what we're talking about.  The vast majority of schools do not meaningfully compete with each other and none of them frankly change much from year to year.  It's not a football team that may graduate a ton of production with a weak class or two following.  A student body and academic resources are going to be consistent from year to year.  There may be a small trend over the course of several years, but realistically a ranking shouldn't change by more than a spot or two in any given year.  There is no Coach Prime of college Presidents that is going to completely change a school in a single summer.

Supreme Court clerkships actually skew more severely than you say.  For this year's incoming class, 28 out of 38 came from 4 schools: Yale, Stanford, Harvard, and Chicago.  That is pretty typical.  Hopefully, my son is one of them in two years -- he just graduated from UC and started his first Fed Appellate clerkship.  It's a pretty sweet gig, I can tell you.

These are both interesting responses. My reply to wolpherine2000 would be that I completely agree with his second sentence. The US News is a system that simply affirms that elite schools create elite graduates out of elite applicants. It does not measure value-added very well at all.

But note, again, that this does not prove the rankings are useless, only that you should be careful what they are measuring. After all, say you were a student who really wanted to go to a school where you were surrounded by super smart people that you could talk to and bounce ideas off of. The rankings would be a good way to tell where the brightest young people tend to congregate.

To JMK, I think you're correct that people often try to game the system, but I think we can clearly see evidence of the remaining effectiveness of the rankings from the external data. If, say, you were a super ambitious law student who wanted to clerk for a Supreme Court justice, the history of that endeavor seems to demonstrate that there really is a big difference between the #25 ranked law school and the #5 ranked law school.