BLACKSBURG -- Jessica Blint graduated from her Pittsburgh high school with a grade point average over 4.0. She scored 1300 on her SAT.

Not surprisingly, the list of schools to which the incoming Virginia Tech freshman applied included rankings darlings UCLA, the University of Virginia and Boston College. Applying to a school not listed in U.S. News & World Report's top 100 was out of the question.

"Getting into a top-ranked school is a priority," she said, walking through the university's bookstore during freshman orientation last month.

As competition for getting into college has increased, the business of proclaiming what schools are best has grown. National publications touting the best colleges fill newsstands, and bookshelves are cluttered with guides. Rankings are subject of lengthy debate on Internet message boards.

The leader in the field is U.S. News & World Report. The magazine started ranking colleges in 1987 and comes out with its new rankings Friday.

Time and Newsweek publish their own college issues listing top schools, but without the comprehensive rankings of U.S. News. Other publications rank schools on everything from best social life to best record of social service. The Princeton Review has become famous for using surveys to categorize the student body. There are even rankings on which schools are best for black, Asian, Latino and disabled students.

But for all their measurements of SAT scores, student surveys and peer assessments, these publications don't know what really makes one college better than another, critics charge.

"I think they're invalid. I think they've done great harm," said Richard Hersh, former president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Trinity College. "They're spurious in that they measure all the wrong things."

Studies show that, when adjusted for the type of student who attends, the prestige of a school has no effect on how successful people are after college. "Garbage in, garbage out; diamonds in, diamonds out," is a phrase Hersh uses frequently.

Hersh said higher education has itself to blame for not doing a better job at measuring how colleges accomplish their most important mission -- educating students. "There's a vacuum and that's why people like U.S. News & World Report have basically created a profit center."

Another way to measure

Hersh is co-director of the Collegiate Learning Assessment Project, a study being conducted by the Council for Aid to Education and the Rand Corporation, two nonprofit groups.

The study uses written tests to measure critical thinking and problem-solving skills of more than 40,000 students from 200 colleges. By testing students at different junctures of their college careers, Hersh hopes to learn what factors affect how well they learn.

The National Survey of Student Engagement also has been trying to measure such "value-added" criteria through surveys that ask students questions such as how many hours a week they study and how often they interact with faculty.

A confidentiality agreement leaves the publication of the information up to the individual colleges. Less than half of the 1,100 schools involved make the data available.

This lack of transparency by colleges that receive billions of dollars in public funding is the real problem, not publications like U.S. News, said Alex Usher, vice president of the Educational Policy Institute.

"It really isn't responsible public policy," said Usher, who has done research on college rankings around the world. "You need to do something for the consumer. ... This idea that we shouldn't encourage competition amongst colleges is crazy."

Robert Morse, director of data research at U.S. News, said he would like to find a way to incorporate studies like the NSSE. He said he doesn't want the magazine to be the arbiter of what is good and what is bad in higher education.

"We're not trying to say that our rankings are scientific ... with dissertation-level research," he said. "But we have been doing our rankings for over 20 years and have got a lot of input from people in higher education."

U.S. News publishes some NSSE data that schools have agreed to release, but Morse said not enough schools participate.

Still, critics point out that U.S. News has enough pull in the industry to pressure colleges to comply. Data like graduation rates didn't exist in any uniform state until U.S. News started requesting it for its rankings.

While public schools have to release the NSSE data, some private schools such as Roanoke College see the survey as a tool to improve themselves and worry about the data being manipulated if it were applied to a ranking system -- the very thing the survey was designed to counter.

"You feel like the data on NSSE is a little more pure," said Mike Maxey, Roanoke College's vice president for college relations and dean of admissions and financial aid.

Gaming the system

The data that receives the most criticism -- and the most weight in U.S. News -- is peer assessment.

Twenty-five percent of a school's score is dependent on this 1-to-5 ranking. Beyond the conflict of interest of officials evaluating colleges near them in the rankings, there is the problem of asking people to accurately assess hundreds of schools.

Officials can choose to leave scores for some schools blank and sometimes don't fill them out at all. The assessments get about a 57 percent response rate, though they're not always filled out by the people they're sent to.

"Every single president I worked for here, ... they'd say, 'Larry, fill these out if you want,' " Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker said.

While Hincker said Tech has never put too much stock in the U.S. News rankings, he thinks they're the best of what's out there. He knows of other schools, however, that work to climb the U.S. News charts.

George Dehne, president of a Connecticut-based higher education consulting firm, said schools worry about rankings too much. His firm did a study that showed alumni, embracing the horse-race mentality of the rankings, actually pay more attention to U.S. News rankings than students.

"I don't want to tell my friends I'm playing golf with that my school is ranked lower than yours," he said.

Jessica Blint's mother, Gloria Blint, said she's moved past the status-conscious rankings game. Her oldest child went to the College of Wooster in Ohio and got a great education at the school, now ranked 68th among liberal arts schools in U.S. News.

Her daughter also has moved on, admitting that she didn't get into the higher-ranked schools.

"I don't care," she said. "I'm happy to be here."