Don't recall it being RC-only versus an aggregate of all RU-NB undergraduate colleges/schools (as it continues to be now....because how else could they give a rank and not factor in the multiple thousand undergrad students combined from Engineering, Pharmacy, Cook/SEBS, Mason Gross, etc?...regardless of whether or not the four liberal arts & sciences colleges were ranked collectively).
Also recall that pretty much for the entire decade of the 80s all the liberal arts and sciences departments in terms of the faculty were already consolidated under the single Faculty of Arts & Sciences.
Anyway, RU-NB dropped or continued declining over the course of the 90s and into the 2000s, quite a bit before the restructuring in the mid-late 2000s. Some believe the focus on grad/doctoral level education and research output to push for AAU status (achieved in '89) caused the undergrad level education to be overlooked for some time.
After a continuation of the decline upon the consolidation of DC, LC, RC, & UC into a single SAS (in 2006) and allowing some time for things to smooth out, arguably it's the consolidation that has since positioned RU-NB to bounce back a bit in the rankings (Engineering, Pharmacy, etc did not likely drop during that time and at least remained steady due to STEM-related demand), while the introduction of the Honors College in the past few years has also been a factor in helping to bump things up.
