US News rankings and competitiveness of admissions

[Luke99]

I recently took a look into the US news rankings for schools in applied math and statistics. Generally, the rankings went how I expected with some occasional outliers, for instance NYU is #37 in statistics, Yale is #17 in statistics, and Harvard is #22 in applied math. I then took a look into the placements of recent graduates from the programs in question and they seem to be on par with higher-ranked programs. I'm wondering if US News is mistaken in these ranks and if ranking is indicative of the competitiveness of admissions. 

Thanks

[bayessays]

Yale is 13, pretty accurate, maybe it could be moved up to 11? There's a lot of good programs at the top.

NYU barely has a statistics department, just like 5 people within Stern.  Probably affects their grade a lot.

Rankings are not super indicative of competition - department size, geographical desirability, name-brand recognition matter a lot.  I'm sure NYU and Northwestern are more competitive than Iowa and Florida State.