<p>I have developed my own model for evaluating colleges because I was wary about giving too much emphasis to the US News rankings or the Forbes ranking, or other rankings. I spent way too much time on this exercise, but I did draw some informative conclusions. Compared to the established ranking publications, my ranking does not show as high a correlation between quality and selectivity in admissions. For example, I evaluated about 120 schools at the top of the US News and Forbes lists. Of these, my top 30 schools exclude a few Ivy League schools, and three of my top 30 have acceptance rates at or higher than 50%. My advice would be for the student and parent to jointly decide on criteria that matter, and then find schools that meet your own criteria, using the very large amount of publicly available data. IF I had to pick one statistic to separate schools by quality, it would be the 4-year graduation rate, which I believe is a better indicator of quality than the admission rate. (Admittedly, the most selective schools tend to have high 4-year graduation rates.)</p>
<p>As for where to get quality info on each school, you could go to IPEDS (federal government data base). I found the following sources of info very valuable: the Common Data Set for each college (info on class size, graduation rates, percent of faculty with terminal degree, etc.), the NSF survey of earned doctorates (how many graduates go on to earn a Ph.D. from a given college), payscale.com (salary info over time for graduates of any particular school). I also like the National Survey of Student Engagement, which indicates how students spend their time.</p>