Exactly. Perception is reality and these US news rankings are important to prospective students, funding, and general prestige of the school. Factors like alumni donations - although a small factor - has been hurting us, and is something we can do to improve our overall score. We've also plateaued at a 31-33% acceptance rate. I'd like us to try and decrease that to under 30%. That can be done either by having more students apply -- thus turning down more students. Or making the admission yield higher. Right now our yield is 25%, which means 25% of the students UR accepts will enroll. Top schools have 50-75% yield rate. To get a higher yield rate, we have to incentivize more students to choose UR, which in turns mean we can accept fewer students in the next cycle and thus lower acceptance rate.
All in all we are doing something right since we've gone up the last four years. However, as years 2007-2008 and 2014-2015 show, UR can have a sudden drop too. It's all based on random metrics but ultimately the rank is something very important and something we should strive to improve