The choice of whether and where to attend college is among the most important investment decisions individuals and families make, yet people know little about how institutions of higher learning compare along important dimensions of quality…popular rankings of college quality, such as those produced by U.S. News, Forbes, and Money, focus only on a small fraction of the nation’s four-year colleges and tend to reward highly selective institutions over those that contribute the most to student success.
Source: Beyond College Rankings : A Value-Added Approach to Assessing
Two- and Four-Year Schools, Brookings Institution, ,Jonathan Rothwell
and Siddharth Kulkarni