Me thinks they've maxed out their appeal as a safety school for the Chicago suburbs (currently around 25-30 percent of their incoming freshman classes), and they've never been able to duplicate their success there in other regions around the country. And they're too arrogant to start accepting some Ohio kids that they now reject who would most likely pay full tuition, so the budget crunch is on. Also, for all their arrogance, their fundraising is nothing special--endowment is currently smaller than Ohio's, less than half UC's and a tenth of OSU's.
Miami is 2.5 hours closer to Chicago, a place that is basically NYC level cultural amenities at half the cost of living. People from there don't exactly want to relocate to Columbus like they do in Ohio. Its families that make their college decisions on the USNWR rankings. They've added more and more private schools to those rankings in recent years which is good for them put pushing the publics that have benefited from the USNWR down. Then it gets to be like why do I want to pay so much money to go out-of-state to attend the 125th rated school? That could be a disaster for Miami if they lost the Chicago kids.
As hard as they try, they've never been able to replicate that Chicago success in other parts of the country, and they're about to fall out of the top 100 in USNWR. As hard as they bang that 35 year old book, I just don't see that as meaning much to kids and their parents today. It really is pathetic the way they cling to it (
http://miamioh.edu/publicivy/what-is-a-public-ivy/index.html ). I guess it's probably because it's all they have. I hardly doubt that any of the other schools on that list (except Vermont perhaps) haven't mentioned it for a couple of decades.