Universities get to pick and choose among the applicants they want to pick and choose among. Parents and prospective students may hear of colleges they'd never heard of before. They emphasize precisely what can be counted, and sweep aside what cannot be. They boost a secular society's version of canonization. In the mania for ranking, shoppers tend to assume that rankers have reason to know what they're talking about.
Numbers look hard and fast.
Academics may get promoted on the basis of the number of times their names come up in the citation index which counts the number of times their colleagues mention their work in journal articles. Hence the numerals that clutter up the screen of every sports broadcast. Hence the poll fetish that is sweeping throughout the world inspired, if that is the word, by number-crunchers. Rankings, of course, are only as good as data, and data are smeared with fingerprints. Everyone who uses ratings, rankings and prize lists should keep salt-shakers with fat holes at the ready.