What attributes define a 'top accounting program', and how reliable are they if they are provided by the institutions themselves? ( about twenty years ago I participated in some research on the various generic published college ranking systems like U.S. News & World Report, Money Magazine, Forbes, Niche, Princeton Review, etc. ).

Almost all of them use the "Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education" ( https://carnegieclassifications.acenet.edu/carnegie-classification/classification-methodology/ ). So an exhaustive filtering of which of the data attributes ( what they call 'dimensions' / 'characteristics' ) to identify which have some sort of spatial temporal dependence is non-trivial ( IMHO ). Defining the theme of 'top' would allow sub-setting according to one of their existing themes.

Below the institutional level itself ( university ) through the colleges and then departments to programs and tracks, the statistics become even murkier. If 'top' was defined along a 'research' axis it could be measured using citation indexes, if it is by student post-hoc financial success much more difficult ( especially since the US government, the largest employer in the country in practically all fields has found that the influence of higher ed decays considerably after about five years in terms of total career interval ).

The effect on curricula might be influenced by spatial proximity to major firms in the area because of donations, grants, scholarships, internships, professional networking, etc. - in our region Microsoft has considerable pull in matters of EE and Comp Sci.