The various college ranking efforts are sort of like car wrecks. You almost have to look.

The emphasis is on teaching at Washington's private, nonprofit colleges and universities. Photo: Whitworth University.

Yesterday Lynn O’Shaughnessy reported in The College Solution blog on CBS Moneywatch about new lists of the U.S. colleges with the best and worst professors. The ratings were cooked up by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, which crunched numbers from RateMyProfessors.com, so if you own a salt mine you might want to gulp a shovel-full with these ratings. (At the annual conference of The Communications Network earlier this fall we learned just enough about crowdsourcing to be dangerous; students aren’t exactly an unbiased group when it comes to evaluating the faculty.)

For what it’s worth, Independent Colleges of Washington member Whitworth University ranked number 16 in the country for best professors, the only Washington college to make the top-25 list. What we especially liked, though, was a bit of O’Shaughnessy’s analysis of the rankings:

What do the colleges on this list share in common? All of them are small private institutions. Most of the schools are liberal arts colleges with student bodies well under 4,000 students. And that’s not surprising since liberal arts colleges tend to offer smaller classes and the prime focus of professors at these schools is teaching not research.

Indeed, small classes led by dedicated teaching professors are strong points of private, nonprofit colleges such as our membership. We share a commitment to high-quality, academically rigorous learning, and to an education that emphasizes critical thinking, lifelong learning, ethics, leadership, and community service.

We’re thankful no Washington colleges made the worst-professors list. In fact, no schools in the West did. For some reason the students in the Midwest and East seem more grumpy about their professors, at least on the RateMyProfessors website.

The U.S. News & World Report rankings of the nation’s best colleges are out today. The rankings are an item of constant debate. We wonder if they really mean anything, if they try to measure the right things, if it’s actually possible to quantify some of those things, and whether students really take the rankings much into account when they’re trying to decide where to go to college.

Love them or hate them, though, most of us can’t avoid looking.

So yes, we looked, and found three Independent Colleges of Washington member institutions among the top 10 regional colleges in the West, and five in the top 15. Two others were ranked within the top tier in that category.

Gonzaga University rates best in the state at number 4, Seattle University is sixth, and Whitworth University ninth. Both ICW members in the national liberal arts college category ranked well, with Whitman College at 38 and University of Puget Sound at 81. In addition, five of our 10 members made the top nine in best value among regional colleges in the West. (Did you guess that Harvard and Williams would top their respective lists… again?)

We’re not sure what it means that PLU (13) is one “notch” higher than Seattle Pacific University (14), but it is good to see so many of our colleges rated so well by this tool, for whatever it’s worth.

Many of our member colleges elect not to even acknowledge the rankings. Of those that do, here’s what they’re saying today:

• Gonzaga University
• Seattle University
• Walla Walla University
• Whitman College
• Whitworth University

The University and College Accountability Network (U-CAN), a consumer information Web site for students considering private, nonprofit colleges and universities, has unveiled newly updated data for hundreds of institutions.  The National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) developed and maintains U-CAN.

The updated Web site includes the most recent information available in areas important to prospective students and their families, including admissions, enrollment, cost of attendance, student aid, faculty, and more.

This is the third update to U-CAN since the Web site launched in September 2007.  In addition to the new data, U-CAN offers 147 searchable fields and 25 “clickable” buttons that link to additional information found on individual campus Web sites.

“Many families are overwhelmed by the college search process, and don’t believe they are getting the information and guidance necessary to make an informed choice,” said NAICU President David L. Warren. “U-CAN helps prospective students and their families make sense of the facts they need to find the best college fit.”

Since 2007, the number of private colleges and universities signed up to participate has grown from 600 to 808 institutions, including all 10 members of Independent Colleges of Washington. The site has had over one million visitors, and reached 2 million page views this week.

NAICU serves as the unified national voice of independent higher education. With more than 1,000 member institutions and associations nationwide, NAICU reflects the diversity of private, nonprofit higher education in the United States. NAICU members enroll 85 percent of all students attending private institutions. They include traditional liberal arts colleges, major research universities, church- and faith-related institutions, historically black colleges, Hispanic-serving institutions, single-sex colleges, art institutions, two-year colleges, and schools of law, medicine, engineering, business, and other professions.

The annual U.S. News & World Report ranking of America’s Best Colleges is hard to ignore. Though some are trying to. We note that neither the Seattle Times nor SeattlePI.com covered the rankings release locally, going with an Associated Press story instead.

We’ve written in this space that such rankings should be taken with a grain of salt. A local high school student recently urged her peers to do their own rankings. Elsewhere there’s much more disdain. Lynn O’Shaughnessy calls them “a joke” on her College Solution blog for CBS Moneywatch. The Oregonian quotes Reed College President Colin Diver as dismissing the rankings as based on “ignorance, partial knowledge and a gossip-mill mentality”—this despite the fact the magazine rates Reed as one of the “up-and-coming” liberal arts colleges. Reed has refused to participate in the process for years, and more colleges follow that tack every year.

We like Whitworth University President Bill Robinson’s take on the rankings: “It’s great that our efforts are recognized every year by U.S. News,” Robinson says, “but we try not to make too much of the rankings and don’t recommend that prospective students do either. There are far more important things that determine whether Whitworth or another school is the best fit for a particular student.”

Like Robinson, we think that fit is most important. But we’re pleased to see five of the members of Independent Colleges of Washington ranked in the top 16 best universities that grant both undergraduate and master’s degrees in the west, and five among the top 10 “best values” in the same category.

Both of our members that are classified as liberal arts colleges are rated in the top tier in that category.

Here’s what Gonzaga University and Whitworth University have to say about the rankings.

Meanwhile, prospective students can use tools such as NAICU’s U-CAN (University and College Accountability Network) to compare colleges based on hard, apples-to-apples data. The information included in the system was selected because students and families said it was what’s really important to them.

College-bound students must realize that neither ranking nor names should matter. No criteria are more important than their own.

Yoo Jung Kim

We might have written that, but Yoo Jung Kim, who will be a senior at Kamiak High School in Mukilteo this fall, beat us to the punch. It’s the concluding line in her opinion column published today by The Seattle Times.

Kim’s main points are that the criteria you choose can give you wildly differing results in your college rankings, and that some of the criteria, such as college reputation in U.S. News or professor ratings in Forbes, aren’t very scientific.

Her advice is good. Students should decide what’s important for them when choosing a college, and actually pay visits to the ones on their short lists. Finding the best “fit” is a key factor in how happy and successful students will be in college. Your college should fit your personality and academic ability. It should challenge you. It should have classes and degree programs in subjects you would like to study. It should have activities in which you’re interested.

Our ProjectOpportunity.net Web site has lots of great advice about preparing for, choosing, and applying to college. Give it a look.

We take the various efforts to rank colleges with a grain or two of salt. It seems like a far-fetched exercise to come up with some sort of analysis-based number that indicates the quality of something so complicated, diverse, and personal as a college or university. And we find “fit” to be a far more important factor than reputation when it comes to predicting good higher education outcomes. Yet these rankings make fascinating reading. It’s always interesting to see how those doing the ranking define quality and how they seek to go out and “measure” it.

Forbes magazine is pretty new to this game. It issued its second such set of annual rankings yesterday. Here’s the Forbes article, and coverage from The College Solution blog, the New York Times, and the Seattle Times.

Assessments by students on ratemyprofessors.com are the biggest factor in the overall Forbes score. Student debt, four-year graduation rate, graduates’ salaries from PayScale.com, and numbers of alumni in Who’s Who are also key parts of the Forbes methodology.

According to Forbes, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point is the nation’s best college, just ahead of Princeton and CalTech. Independent Colleges of Washington member Whitman College is the top-rated college from the state, at number 20 overall. Six other ICW members cracked the top 500, as did the UW, WSU, and Western.