The College Ranking Surveys Have Launched

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Various lists of college rankings are not the problem. The problem is people -- parents, students, administrator -- looking for the ONE number that summarizes which schools are best.
This is no different than judging students just on their SAT scores or just on some quantitative mathematical composite of test scores, GPA, AP class taken, etc.
I find the single numerical composite score and ranking order based off that score to be pretty useless as a guide. However, quite a few of the publications list all of their data and you can take that data, weight the things that matter most to you more heavily, and create your own index and rankings.
For instance, I agree with person who commented that alumni contribution rates unfairly disadvantage public colleges. So I don't include those in the rankings I create. However, its important to my children that full professors teach close to 100% of classes. They also like average class sizes that are smaller than average. So I weight those things about triple what I think most of the ranking guides do.
My kids and I are looking for the best colleges for THEM, not some generic list of what someone else thinks is best.
Get the data that is published, put it in a spreadsheet, and play around with it. One of the best discussions my older daughter and I had about college was when she went through the various pieces of data and said "I don't care about that", "I really care about that", etc. So you can use the data and the process you use to weight the data to have a great discussion with your children AND end up with a list of colleges where your children will be successful.
Hard to beat that.

Pio Caesare of WA 8:45PM April 03, 2009

When, oh when, are you going to finally stop using alumni contribution rates in your ranking of colleges?
As far as I can tell, this is done for one reason only, which is to guarantee that the top 20 colleges ranked will all be private colleges--and that a public college will never be ranked near the top.
It is a ridiculous statistic that has zero correlation with college academics, graduation rates, or the college experience. It has as much validity as my grandmother's drivers license number.
Get rid of this bogus measure--and maybe then someone will actually consider your rankings worthwhile.

G. Kelly of CA 4:50AM March 30, 2009

BS! This is all BS! Forget college rankings! They don't help the students. Plus, screw you all college rankers. Information you don't get, you just make up. You think that will help people? STOP RANKING COLLEGES! DO THE WORLD A FAVOR! Or, at least set up a data chart for which colleges excel in which area. That will help more than a bland list.

JZ2DLimit of CA 9:47PM March 25, 2009