The high-profile U.S. News rankings on the nation’s colleges are out. Arizona schools don’t fare well in them.

The University of Arizona actually fell six notches to 102. ASU remains mired at 121. (The rankings are for the schools’ overall status. Both, obviously, have individual graduate schools of national repute.)

The Republic, cheerleading furiously, looks on the bright side …

Arizona State University has maintained its No. 121 slot in a widely followed ranking of U.S. colleges and is listed for the second consecutive year as an “Up-and-Coming School.” That category highlights universities that have made innovative changes.

[emphasis added] … and does its best to denigrate the US News ranking. This passage strikes us as particularly grasping:

The annual list gets a lot of attention but is controversial because the criteria used to rank schools tends to favor elite, private universities. For instance, schools with tough admission policies and more money to spend per student get more points, while those with more lenient admission standards and less money are penalized.

Well, duh!

The rankings are controversial, but that’s not anything close to why. That’s the equivalent to asking your kid why he isn’t getting better grades and him saying “Ahh, the teacher’s just concerned about good scores on tests and class attendance and stuff like that.”

Would you praise your kid for “maintaining” a D average?

Besides being the subject of some debate in the higher-education community, the rankings are silly because every school has great teachers and just about every school offers a great education if the student works at it. That said, local readers would be better served if he Republic offered at least a touch of a debate about why the state hasn’t managed to develop a nationally recognized higher-education system. Arizona now has a bigger population than Massachusetts—yet the latter has at least eight schools in the top 100 (Williams for one, didn’t qualify for the main list) and two in the top ten.

It’s a debate we could have instead of, say, discussing whether it’s appropriate to hang around outside of a presidential appearance carrying guns.

Incidentally, the story gets this not-minor fact wrong: Harvard was not number one “followed by” Princeton. The actual rankings have the two tied for first.