I've done my best to create a ranking of graduate creative writing programs by measuring the appearance of programs' graduates in the top prize anthologies. It's been generally well received although there has been some resistance to the idea of ranking programs like this. There's still a lot of work to be done on it, but the basic structure, at least is in place.
There's a fair amount of manual data collection. I get an excuse to enter into e-mail correspondence with 100s of writers each year, although I have most of the initial contact programmatically driven. There's also automatic annual e-mails of program directors in August to get the latest data from them and for the top schools on the list, I'll make calls if they don't answer the e-mails. In the fall I end up spending an hour or so a day dealing with all the e-mails and data entry.
http://creativewritingmfa.info/rankings/