Introduction: a different kind of college ranking.

• Position: OUR THIRD ANNUAL COLLEGE GUIDE - Cover story - Table

This summer, a group of sixty-one liberal arts college presidents announced that they would no longer participate in the annual U.S. News & World Report college rankings. We were of two minds about this news.

On the one hand, we've long argued that the U.S. News ratings are silly, because they don't measure what its editors say they measure: academic excellence. What U.S. News does to arrive at its results involves gauging things like average faculty salaries, for instance, or the level of praise for one college from the presidents of other colleges. Maybe that's not totally useless, but it's also a bit like assessing the quality of restaurants based on the effectiveness of their advertising and how much they spend on linen. Given the tremendous influence the U.S. News guide nevertheless has on university administrators and prospective students, our first instinct was to cheer the college presidents' Spartacus-like rebellion.

On the other hand, we couldn't help but suspect that what motivated the colleges wasn't just anger at the inadequacies of the U.S. News methodology, but a desire to avoid rankings altogether. Though the protesting schools vowed to create their own, better measures of academic excellence, we weren't too surprised to see the group's chair, Gettysburg College President Katherine Haley Will, claim in the Washington Post that an "educational experience can't be reduced to one number, a school's so-called rank." Instead, she argued, "we must encourage students to look inside their hearts and trust their instincts when it comes to choosing a college."

How beautiful. Trusting in the oracular powers of the heart may have been the right advice for Obi-wan Kenobi to offer Luke Skywalker as the young Jedi-to-be swung a light saber while blindfolded. But it's understandable that students and parents who are about to plunk down tens of thousands of dollars in tuition for a life-determining college education might be looking for more solid information. Some colleges and universities simply do a better job of educating students than others, and rankings are the most broadly understandable way to convey that truth. U.S. News's numbers may be deeply flawed, but its aim is perfectly worthy--indeed, it's essential.

But even if U.S. News were able to discern the academically "best" schools, that would be only one kind of ranking. There are other, equally important ways to judge colleges. We believe that what colleges do matters not just to prospective applicants, but also to the rest of us. After all, America depends on its institutions of higher education for a variety of crucial public tasks: conducting the cutting-edge research...