It's true that rankings should be taken with a grain of salt since the quality of an institution can't really be evaluated on a absolute linear scale; still, if you read about it the NRC rankings are based on bogus data and are not worth worrying about at all. One can at least hope that the US News rankings are not (admittedly I do not know their methodology). Still, it seems safe to say that the US News rankings are a much better approximation of reality than the NRC ratings. Also, name recognition isn't everything but it is still important and there is a fairly strong correlation between name recognition and the quality of the school; this is likely partly a self fufilling prophesy but that is irrelevant.
