The college rankings are here! Right in time for students to apply to the best colleges! But wait, which college is best? US News & World Report and Forbes say Princeton is best university but the Wall Street Journal and Niche say MIT. Meanwhile the Princeton Review lists Featured colleges first so you'd think Christopher Newport University is best., and the Associated Press is all in on the University of Oregon. What's a student to do?

College rankings present a huge opportunity for families and students if they’re willing to figure out how to use them. Why? Because ever since US News & World Report started ranking colleges back in the 1980s, colleges have been focused on moving up in the rankings. And that means that many schools are on the lookout for students who will help them move up and making great merit aid offers to such students. So let's stop the pearl-clutching and let the rankings work for you.

First and foremost, each rankings methodology is slightly different, which accounts for differences in the rankings themselves. US News’ rankings get the most attention, so colleges wanting to move up in the rankings tend to be most focused on their methodology. (By the way, US News' rankings are so important to colleges that there's an annual conference that colleges attend to learn about them, presumably to try to move up.) US News uses a combination of outcomes (graduation rates, student debt, college graduates earning more than high school graduates, and "graduation rate performance," a measure of whether the college produces more or less graduates than it should based on the population it enrolls), and student experience-related measures such as faculty salaries, financial resources supporting academics, faculty research, and student-faculty ratio, and, for colleges where at least 50% of new students submitted test scores, test scores. In addition, 20% of the US News ranking is "peer assessment" or how other academics rate each college.

What's helpful about US News' rankings is they are telling you what colleges want. And one of the ways that colleges try to attract students they want is by offering them scholarships. One element that they want that's within your control is test scores. So students applying to colleges in the top, say, 100 spots on the US News rankings list should absolutely take standardized tests, and then submit them to any college where that test score is in the top 50% of students. (Look the college up on CollegeData or College Navigator to find out where your scores fit.) With class rank no longer part of the formula, taking the tests is your best option to help a college out in the rankings process.

Forbes, on the other hand, uses primarily outcomes data for its rankings: alumni salaries, graduation rate, debt, ROI, academic success and more, which might explain why its top 10 includes some public universities. Niche includes student feedback in its ratings. And the AP of course uses football game scores.

There's a reason why all the college rankings come out in the fall: colleges use them to market themselves to prospective students, which in turn results in more applications.

Most important of all: None of the college ranking systems are about your student. None of them tells you where they're going to find their people, make a new home, learn and grow and become the best version of themselves. So look at rankings all you want, as long as you remember that your #1 is about you, not about US News.