Reinventing the wheel? (Score 2, Informative)

I think this problem could have been easily solved by what Information Retrieval community has been practicing for decades now: Vector Space Model. In fact just going by the description of the method provided by the news article, it seems that the their method is not much different than the VSM model and simple cosine similarity could have been applied between the priority vector ("query vector") and each university's score("docuement vectors") along the 7 dimensions. Then all universities could be ranked in the descending order of the cosine, 1 being the perfect match. Am I missing something or this is a reinvention of the wheel?