This seems a much more logical way to rank colleges and universities - rather than the name recognition popularity contest that is the US News & World Report rankings.

IT is always important, throughout life, to determine how much better something is that other things. Better-ness allows one to crow, get paid more, lord things over others, feel smug, get confidence by handing out name cards, and other trappings of lives not really grappling with much more than personal feelings of temporary satisfaction and ranking success.

I would prefer rankings of which student at a so-so institution cleverly used its modest resources so wisely that they propelled themselves into later star-dom and historic levels of creative contribution to civilization. I love that eager assessment in the eyes of people who know they are modestly placed in society and who optimize what little they find around them. That assessing skill and optimizing skill serve them well when accolades and real accomplishments issue forth to and from them later in life.

I went to a college so much greater than I was that all my life I have been crushed by a painful daily presence of the immensity of my cognitive faults and failings. Had I gone full scholarship at a state school of modest circumstances, I would be a fat rich real estate salesperson, raising obtuse kids by now. Instead I scramble not to fall off of the obscure risky knowledge tree branches that I alone get interested in till weird results draw attention after I publish and move on to other branches. My kids suffer growing up in an atmosphere of the immensity of knowledge to be had and the race of single human minds to imagine and encompass as much of that as possible in tiny lifespans.