Time magazine highlights the huge problem with rankings:

Rather than showing vast differences between schools, the survey highlighted huge disparities in how well each campus was engaging all of its students. For instance, how engineering students scored the quality of on-campus tutoring programs at School A vs. School B may not have varied much. But how School A’s engineering students judged those programs may be radically different from how School A’s business students do. That finding underscores why using one single number to gauge an entire school is an ineffective tool at best for predicting what an undergraduate experience will be like. 

They argue that the National Survey Student Engagement is a more valuable tool as it allows students to zero in more specifically on experience of students on campus rather than reputation: “The results provide an estimate of how undergraduates spend their time and what they gain from attending college.” Over 1200 in North America participated this year:

USA Today publishes selected results on several hundred universities focusing on

• Level of academic challange
• Active and collaberative learning
• Student-faculty intereaction
• Enriching educational experiences
• Supportive campus environment