The NY Times publishes a tool that does NOT profess to know what factors are most relevant to every different student.
So instead of a “one-fits-all” hit-parade, where editors fudge the weighting factors each year to produce fresh click-baiting results, each student uses sliders to set their own personal weighting factors on a number of criteria - and THEN produces a personalized list:
Here’s the tool:
PS - for non-subscribers, this message should have the “gifted” links:
Cool! I can’t wait to compare the criteria they thought were important to what some of us have posted on our “in-house” criteria strand! Lol
I am guessing we are more creative.
Yep, came up with almost the exact list my youngest applied to after inputting our criteria.
Unfortunately they are both behind the paywall. 
Helpful tool. But would have been more useful if they added acceptance rate as one of the sliders. Otherwise you can end up with a list of all (or mostly) reaches, as happened just now when I tried it out.
DIY College Rankings lets you order all the IPEDS data. We found it very useful.
I just did it and both my kids’ schools ended up in the top 25 of the list after the calculations were done. Pretty funny.
Ah, ok. I missed that. Thank you.
I only did it without the other filters (location, public vs. private, etc.), and my kids’ schools both still came up in the top 25 of the calculations. There were schools from all over the country on the top 25 list, most of which we would not really have considered because of price and location. But, the two that they did attend ending up being on the list must be a sign that they ended up in the right places! 
There you go - they got the “Sulzberger Stamp of Approval” 
Much better than others, but for earnings, they really need to also have a control on the sample size, if it’s from “colleges scoreboard”, or family income, if it’s from elsewhere.
They also should do a more nuanced job with Student-Faculty ratio. They should control for the percent of time a faculty at a college are expected to put into undergraduate teaching. An undergraduate only college with 50 faculty who are 80% teaching, 20% service, realistically has 4X the number of faculty devoted to teaching undergraduates as a school with a PhD program, in which the faculty are required 40% teaching, 40% research, and 20% service. There should also be a penalty for a high percent of teaching being done by non-TT faculty and faculty without terminal degrees. TAs should be added as 1/4 time faculty for FT TA.
All these affect the quality of the academics that a student receives, and is hidden behind the student/faculty ratio.
Still, overall, this is HUGE step in the most positive direction, and even as it is, does a better job of helping parents and students decide than any of the existing rankings.
Bottom line - it’s great, but I think that the methodology still needs some tweaking.
Edited to add - price should be filtered by in-state/OOS
OK…I reupped my NYT subscription. 
Rats, I knew I should have posted my “recommend a friend” link, to qualify for the free toaster. 
Good tool, but I don’t think they adjust earnings for major, so schools with a disproportionately high percentage of students in fields that have high starting compensation (nursing, engineering, etc.) are favored.
High Earning & Party Scene - so you were going for Hospitality major?
Uh … I don’t think my kid’s school appears in the list at all. At least it didn’t show up when I filtered for West Coast public schools. Hard to use the tool to find a great fit school if a large public R1 isn’t even included.
The say they have 900 four-year non-profit colleges/universities, but with some exceptions.
Not sure, if any of these apply:
… at least 500 students.
… more than 50 percent of students graduated within eight years
… only schools that have data for at least three of the 10 measures that we used to weight our rankings.
… more than 75 percent of the students were attending full-time.
… excluded military colleges, maritime colleges, federal service academies, special focus colleges and online universities.
Filtering for schools that graduate more than half their students removes hundreds of schools from our sample, some of them prominent institutions in their communities. But we believe this is an important criterion for inclusion, given how serious a problem the college dropout rate is in America.
