When I was looking at colleges, I looked at US News & World Report's college ratings a grand total of one time. I didn't see the point of using rankings with a methodology that barely took into account what was important to me. At school, I've found that the two prevailing sentiments about the rankings are:

1) The rankings don't mean anything.
And 2) I can't believe they dropped us three places! (Wesleyan dropped from 9th to 12th last year)

However, some people I know, especially parents, swear by the US News rankings, and make it their goal to get into the highest school possible on the list. Now, Washington Monthly has come out with their own rankings, trying to break the hierarchy that the US News rankings reinforce every year, and provide, in their view, a more effective method of determining the return on the investment in a college education.

The Monthly rankings, instead of using (SAT scores, endowment, professor salaries, or rate of alumni giving), they rate on categories such as Social Mobility and Community service. In essence, they aim to measure the quality of students and what they do for the country produced rather than the quality of the institution. So, schools like MIT (#1), Stanford (#7), and Cornell (#8) share the top ten with the likes of state schools such as Penn State (#3), UC San Diego (#6) and South Carolina State (#9). While I applaud the Monthly for attempting to come up with a more fair and effective way of ranking colleges, I think there should be less emphasis on arbitrary rankings and more on just presenting prospective students with as many facts as possible to make an informed decision on where to go to college.