The College Solution: A Guide for Everyone Looking for the Right School at the Right Price, Second Edition

38. The Right Way to Use College Rankings

As long as companies can publish magazines and students can choose colleges, someone will create college rankings that people will read and care about.

—Kevin Carey, policy director at Education Sector

If you’ve ever asked a teenager to name his or her dream schools, I bet these are some of the institutions that would pop up on the list:

• Stanford University

• Harvard University

• New York University

• Princeton University

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Yale University

• UCLA

• University of Pennsylvania

• University of Southern California

• University of California, Berkeley

I actually copied those names from the Princeton Review’s list of teenagers’ most popular dream schools. The parents’ ...