That’s the question my Pope Center colleague Jenna Ashley Robinson asks in a piece we’ve released today.

The answer she gives is that they don’t work very well, at least not yet, and for a variety of reasons including the ability of schools to “game the system.”

In my view, the really important information about colleges is for the most part “micro” data that’s hard if not impossible to quantify. Do students have to read challenging books? Do professors work diligently to improve their students’ writing? Do students get a solid general education curriculum, or just a random assortment of trendy courses? Those are key questions that families can investigate with some difficulty when they’re college shopping, but which defy measurement.