One encouraging sign about the 2014 PGR results is that almost all the changes (with one exception I will come to) in the overall ranking results are pretty clearly attributable either to actual changes in the faculty since the 2011 survey or to improvements in the faculties of schools previously ranked lower.   Virginia, for example, jumped to #31 from #37 after making three senior hires since 2011; USC jumped into the top ten after adding John Hawthorne, formerly Waynflete Professor at Oxford, and the political philosopher Jonathan Quong, as well as strong junior hires and promotions from within the tenure stream ranks; Chicago slipped slightly (#20 to #21), most likely due to the death of the distinguished philosopher of art Ted Cohen and the shift of Michael Forster, the great scholar of German philosophy, from full-time to only quarter-time (Forster now holds a Humboldt Professorship, as well as the Chair in Theoretical Philosophy, at Bonn) (Chicago was probably stopped from a sharper fall by the rising profile of younger faculty like Agnes Callard and Malte Willer); Connecticut jumped from 50th into the top forty after making several senior hires; MIT slipped out of the top ten after losing two senior faculty (Richard Holton and Rae Langton) to Cambridge and with Robert Stalnaker's phased retirement ending in 2016; and so on.   Indeed, I can't find a single case of significant movement in the overall rankings not related to actual changes in the composition of the faculty.

The patterns, I should add, were similar in the UK, Canada, and Australasia, again without exception.

The one exception across all the regions is Colorado, which dropped from 24th to 31st, with only minimal changes in the faculty ranks since 2011.  The explanation there is, I think, clear enough:  because evaluators are asked to consider the attractiveness of the faculty for prospective graduate students, the various troubles in that department, familiar to all, probably led evaluators to rate it less highly.