<p>What the rankings are mainly good for:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/979553-how-did-you-do-your-first-cut-colleges.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/979553-how-did-you-do-your-first-cut-colleges.html</a></p>
<p>Its (of course) not the way to make your final choice. Its not a good way to compare two particular schools, esp schools close to each other in the rankings. It can be problematic being used to compare two very different kinds of schools (a general univ vs a tech school, for ex) </p>
<p>Where it IS useful, is getting a broad fix on a school you have never heard of, in relation to the thousands of institutions of higher ed. For those without a narrow geographic range, or a narrow choice due to the particular progam a student is interested, it can be helpful (though other ways of narrowing the choice can include "was it included in Fisk? etc - the criteria for such inclusion never create the same controversy as USNWR, presumably because USNWR ranks ALL the schools, and more folks get upset about, say the ranking Dartmouth vs Notre Dame, than whether school number 400 made the cut to get into Fisk)</p>