Many other factors, including some that can't be measured, should figure into your decision – such as the school's cost, availability of financial aid, course offerings, activities, the feel of campus life, and the setting and geographic location.
Study the data that accompanies the actual rankings. You should not use the rankings as the sole basis for deciding on one school over another.
High school students can scan the student SAT or ACT scores at different institutions to infer whether they could gain admission to a particular college.
The rankings are a source of useful information about colleges that might otherwise be hard to obtain and can help you narrow your search to a small number of colleges that are a good fit.
They can check student-faculty ratios to see how much attention they are likely to receive from professors at different schools or check freshman retention rates to learn how hard schools work to keep students from dropping out after the first year.
They can also study graduation rates, which are the single best indicator of the proportion of freshmen who graduate with a bachelor's degree from a school.
There are hundreds of fine colleges and universities, and ultimately the challenge is to narrow the list to a few that students would really like to attend.
The advice and rankings on this site will give students the names of some of those schools and help them think more about which colleges make the most sense for them.
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