Which gives the best picture of a college's student body, GPAs, test scores, or HS class rank?

College Search & Selection
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<p>^ An easy way to implement that approach (building a ranked list from graduation rates) is to click-sort on the “4-yr. grad. rate” column on the Kiplinger’s “best value” pages.
<a href=“http://www.kiplinger.com/tool/college/T014-S001-kiplinger-s-best-values-in-private-colleges/index.php”>http://www.kiplinger.com/tool/college/T014-S001-kiplinger-s-best-values-in-private-colleges/index.php&lt;/a&gt;
<a href=“http://www.kiplinger.com/tool/college/T014-S001-kiplinger-s-best-values-in-private-colleges/index.php?table=lib_arts&state_code[]=ALL&id[]=none”>http://www.kiplinger.com/tool/college/T014-S001-kiplinger-s-best-values-in-private-colleges/index.php?table=lib_arts&state_code[]=ALL&id[]=none&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>This will expose a set of N top colleges that is similar (but not identical) to the set you’d expose by using the stateuniversity.com SAT ranking. What are the major differences in, say, the set of colleges with 4y grad rate >= 80%, compared to the set of colleges with 75th pct SAT CR+M >= 1500?</p>

<ul>
<li>Several colleges with a strong religious/sectarian affiliation go up in the graduation rate rank compared to the SAT rank (look at Georgetown, Notre Dame, Villanova, Brandeis, Providence College … Holy Cross)</li>
<li>Several colleges with high engineering program enrollments go down in the graduation rate rank compared to the SAT rank (look at MIT, Stanford, Caltech … Harvey Mudd)</li>
</ul>

<p>If (as ucbalumnus suggests) you are looking purely at how strong academically the incoming freshmen are, then I think the average SAT score is a much better indicator than the 4y graduation rate. If Villanova and Providence College students actually were stronger academically (test scores notwithstanding) than MIT, Caltech and Mudd students, then we should be able to point to some outcome metric to reflect that. One such metric is PhD production. MIT, Caltech and Mudd have some of the very highest PhD production rates in the country. Villanova and Providence would be far, far down the top N list. Georgetown, ND, and Brandeis also would rank well below MIT, Caltech and Mudd.</p>