"outcome measures" increased. Outcome measures are great if they measure how much the school actually increased its students' "outcome measures." However, the strongest indicator for outcome measurements will be the caliber of students that attend that institution. In other words, a school with excellent applicants coming in who turn out to be similarly excellent after graduation will have better outcome measures than a school that takes horrible students and then has very good (but not excellent) outcome measures.

Outcome measures and the caliber of incoming students (which is also a significant factor) are usually pretty good proxies for the caliber of a school, because generally speaking the quality of the school and post-grad degree value will be the primary considerations driving students to go to those universities. Of course, that's not the case for BYU. While those considerations may still be important for BYU students, other factors such as social opportunities, cost, and perceived spiritual safety are massively important to many BYU students (and their parents), which have virtually nothing to do with the quality of the school or the quality of the education. So you then have these significant factors that are untethered to the quality of the school that drive up some of the most important factors keeping BYU's ranking quite high.

The same goes for the cost and the lack of debt for BYU grads; those factors apparently gives BYU a really big bump, and while I agree that they should be really important considerations in choosing a school they have virtually nothing to do with the caliber of the institution or the quality of the education (and in fact they could be detriments to the quality of education because they could limit the availability of resources for the school to invest into improving the institution).