<p>Don’t rely on a rankings list or a single source of information to compare universities. Selecting schools and creating a list isn’t a project that can be completed in a day or two. It takes time and some in-depth research.</p>
<p>You can look at student body factors - like average high school GPA, average class rank, standardized test scores (to a point), diversity of the student body (racial, gender, geographic), etc. Usually schools have them on their website but you can also find them at BigFuture.CollegeBoard.com</p>
<p>IMO, what’s most important are university/college factors. What’s the faculty to student ratio? How big is the average class? How many students are there? What’s the library like in terms of holdings? What about classroom spaces and study spaces on campus? How many computer labs are there and does the university offer free or low-cost software that students need? What does the curriculum look like? Flip through a college bulletin/student handbook. See if you can find syllabi online for interesting classes (some professors post them online). Are the classes innovative with interesting assignments, or are they all lecture style with multiple choice tests?</p>
<p>Are there any really interesting curricular offerings, like a special minor or study abroad programs? Is there an honors program, if you want that? What does it offer, and how hard is it to get into? What’s the preprofessional advising like?</p>
<p>Check out the website for career services; even if you can’t access everything you should be able to see some things. What does their career services office look like? Check out the housing/res life websites and see what programs and offerings there are there.</p>
<p>Get a copy of the student newspaper. Most are online these days. Some student bodies also have blogs (like Columbia’s Bwog) and online professor rating systems (like Columbia’s CULPA). Columbia also maintains a Wiki, WikiCU. Check out stuff like that. What are the students complaining about? What are their important news items? How do they generally rate their professors? What do they think is important? Of course, these sources are written by small groups of students and don’t necessarily reflect every student, or even the student body as a whole, but I think you can get an idea from looking at these things. (For example, I think Bwog + WikiCU taken together gives you an idea of the offbeat, snarky sense of humor the Columbia student body tends to have. Personally, I like it.)</p>
<p>You don’t need rankings list to give you an exact reputational number of a school (which is imprecise anyway). But if you want to use rankings to get a general idea of a university that you’ve never heard of’s reputation, there are many college ranking lists. U.S. News & World Report is the most famous one. Forbes also has one (rather than two lists - one for universities and one for LACs - Forbes ranks them all together). Princeton Review has a list of the 378 best colleges and universities. Washington Monthly also has a ranking (very interesting and also has completely different criteria than the others).</p>
<p>UIUC maintains a list of rankings of undergraduate schools (<a href=“http://www.library.illinois.edu/sshel/specialcollections/rankings/rankgen.html”>About Us – Social Sciences, Health, and Education Library (SSHEL) – U of I Library). Everybody has a different formula and therefore different schools will come out in different orders. If you want to use rankings, I recommend comparing across at least 3 to get a sense of the general location of schools. For example, one thing I noticed was that Pomona was near the top of the list in nearly all of the rankings, even ones with very different methodologies. There are other schools like that, too.</p>