The book we used was Colleges That Change Lives
I got given an older copy of the Princeton review by a neighbor. Maybe 5 years old? It seemed to be basically marketing stuff to me. Nothing critical said about any of the colleges I looked up in it…
@Materof2 The Princeton Review online college search function makes it easier to search for colleges with specific features of student life. We didn’t use it, because we have different sources for this info, but it seems to be very useful for getting all sorts of information as to what it is like to be a student at different colleges, based on student opinions.
Kiplingers is good for “best value” schools
The rankings can be helpful sometimes exposing a national audience to lesser known opportunities. The jockeying for position among the top 50 schools or top ten is somewhat meaningless.
But in some cases it can help. For instance usnwr grad school rankings for computer science and AI. Umass Amherst is #20 tied with Rice and #11 for AI. And it can be nearly impossible to get a top local student to attend for ug. And nationally who would know. For that sort of thing it can help broaden some narrower viewpoints.
For graduate schools, phds.org was always great, since you could decide what criteria to use, from number of faculty who advise graduate students, to funding per student, to number of low income students, and others, and how much weight to give to this criterion. So you could find which programs is the best for you, rather than the best according to some general rankings that may or may not tell you what you want to know.
Most useful ranking is the ranking for endowments money.