I think we can all agree that you can put the 10 top schools in a hat, regardless if a particular school is #3 or #5. Harvard will be in the top 5 of any list. If rankings lists did not exist we would still have some understanding of what the top 20 or so schools are. The acceptance rate is usually a good proxy.
I think centralized ranking performed by private (or even public entities) -- leads to significant bias (either because of corruption or because of .. bias).
So the solution, it seems, would have to be some system of cooperative, transparently weighted contribution to the ranking process
