Niche is a Pittsburgh-based education review and ranking company, sir. Here's the rundown: It's an American company that runs a ranking and review site, headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It started life under a different name — Niche.com was formerly known as College Prowler, founded by Luke Skurman in 2002 as a publisher of print guidebooks on U.S. colleges. Skurman is still the founder and CEO. It rebranded to Niche and shifted from print guidebooks to free online content around 2009, then expanded well beyond colleges — today it covers K–12 schools, colleges, cities, neighborhoods, and companies across the United States. Claude says: A ranking that weights acceptance rate and student-survey vibes most heavily is measuring how hard a school is to get into and how much students like being there — not whether the engineering education or research is any good. Those are different questions, and Niche conflates them. That's why a brand-heavy Ivy with a modest engineering school can outrank Virginia Tech, which is a genuine heavyweight by the measures that actually track engineering output: research expenditures, ABET program depth, PhD production, and recruiter reputation. The fault is as much on anyone treating a campus-satisfaction grade as if it were an engineering-research assessment.