So although I agree one has to be cautious, one possible reason to look at something like average spend per student would be if you don’t in fact know what you will want to be doing in college (what major, what activities, what housing and dining plans, and so on). There can be exceptions, but the higher-resourced colleges tend to spend at least a lot on most things that will help them compete for some students. A lower-resourced college may have to make more tough choices about whether to really be competitive in various different ways.
But again if you have a clear idea of at least the plausible range of things you care about, you can then make some choices. Like a competitive engineering program can be expensive, so if you don’t care about engineering, you can be free to look at colleges with little or no engineering. Although maybe some will be wealthy enough overall it doesn’t matter. And so on.