Pete Matthes, UI senior adviser to the president and vice president for external relations, as quoted by The Gazette‘s Vanessa Miller:
At the University of Iowa, we had record applications and the second-largest class in our history […] In other words, parents and students have voted with their feet.
[…]
As for the list-makers — too often they are substituting an algorithm for what families measure: access, achievement, and careers.
These lists are just made up, but they aren’t meaningless and falling out of this reflects poorly on the University of Iowa, which has seen a variety of declines, and probably compounds these problem.