And another article in which I discuss what I perceive as one of the downsides of conventional college rankings: that they focus on and try to measure the quality of incoming freshmen (SAT scores etc.) rather than the quality of education they receive at their respective colleges or the value added by those colleges. Basically, it's an input vs. output argument. I'm not the first or only person to make it (the Spellings Commission has been grappling with the output side of the equation for a while now), but it's something to keep in mind as you use rankings to help you think about different schools, whether at the college or the graduate school level.