"We wanted to distinguish ourselves from time and news week, because we were the third. And i think it's fair to say our feeling was that the execution could have been a lot better," he says. "So bernstein and his colleagues began collecting a mountain of statistics on the universities and colleges of the united states". To make sense of those numbers, they came up with an algarithm, a secret augarithm, that could assign every school a score of one through 100,. regardless of its size or mission or complexity.