This is a link to the breakdown:

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/ranking-criteria-and-weights

Student test scores and GPA account for the same % as faculty salary. Selectivity of a given school accounts for 7% of the ranking. That's some of the prestige we all think of. Essentially "how elite are their students?" And it accounts for 7% of the ranking. This is the same weight that faculty salary is given. In other words, university rankings are not a one-to-one reflection of how "smart" the students are. No one chooses a school based (solely) on how much professors are paid there, yet it is given the same weight.

There is a "peer assessment" score that is part of the ranking. It's a popularity contest and really has little to do with actual quantitative reasons to rank a school highly. It pretty much is stating that, yes, the Harvard provost thinks Stanford is a good school. And the Stanford dean of admissions thinks Yale is a good school. Nothing quantitative, just "feelings." And these tend to be very biased towards historical perception of the graduate programs at these schools.

Note as well that ~17% of a school's rank (so 2.5 times that of student profile) is based on 6 year graduation rate. BYU will obviously perform poorly on this because a huge portion of their male student body will not graduate in 6 years if they serve a mission. I didn't. It took me 6 and 1/2 years (calendar years). So US News would have looked at me as a black mark at BYU. Never mind that I went on to a PhD.

10% of the rank is based on $$$ per student. This is a measure of how much money is spent "per student." I guarantee that these resources are very heavily weighted towards graduate studies. And, of course, money spent is not a measure of ROI. Just because University of X pumps $50k per year into each student does not mean that each student was better educated (or uniformly saw that money). BYU is at the peak of efficiency. They get more from less.

None of this is to say that BYU is the answer. Maybe it isn't. She needs to decide. There is no shame in choosing BYU. And there is no shame in wanting to investigate other schools. But 1) understand what a high ranking really means, and 2) understand that culture and opportunity for *undergrads* matters.