What’s in a rank? To a lot of people, it means quite a lot.

A year and a half ago when I was applying to colleges, many of my classmates obsessed over rankings. In some instances, I still find them doing so.

In my recent research for College Insurrection I’ve come across numerous articles touting different college ranking methods. The most notable ranking is courtesy of U.S. News & Report, but Forbes’ and Money magazine’s are making headlines particularly because of where certain big-name schools like Harvard and Yale rank compared to lesser-known ones like Williams College and Babson College.

I mention these two schools in particular because they top the lists of Forbes’ and Money’s lists, respectively. Forbes puts Williams College as number one in its list, which it claims treats both liberal arts colleges and research universities equally. Stanford came in second, followed by Swarthmore, and Harvard clocked in at seventh. Money magazine ranked Babson the country’s best college in terms of post-graduation earnings compared to cost of attendance. Coming in number two was the tiny Webb Institute, which admits about 40 students per year for one major: naval architecture.

The Center for World University Rankings uses some innovative methods to come up with “scores” for each school it ranks. Harvard takes the number one spot, predictably, with a perfect score of 100. Most of the other Ivies save Dartmouth (44th) and Brown (81st), Stanford (2nd), MIT (3rd), Berkeley (7th), U. Chicago (8th), etc. make expected appearances in the top twenty, of course.

To be frank, I can’t answer the question I posed in the headline. I think that it is impossible to truly rank colleges and universities. There are myriad metrics of various merit and sensibility, but in the end it seems like a futile and rather uninformative statistic–where a college ranks on a list–to someone considering applying to such schools.

I can say, however, that I thoroughly oppose using high school metrics like SAT and ACT scores in rankings because those numbers do not reflect how “good” a university is, just how “smart” its students were in high school.

I think high school seniors seeking to go to college should think a great deal about money as Money magazine does. This is not an endorsement for Money’s ranking method because its method like most others is all based on averages. I don’t think students should aim for average. Instead, they should think about which particular universities they can get into that would best optimize affordability with providing them with the skills, experience, and prestige necessary to achieve what they want to achieve.