It was the 'Best of' lists and the 'Worst of' lists

What? Even after perusing U.S. News & World Report's annual "Best Colleges" guide and The Princeton Review's Best 368 Colleges list, you still can't pick the best school for you? All right then, Forbes magazine has come to the rescue with its own guide to America's Best Colleges 2008. Why? Well, according to the magazine

Choosing a four-year undergraduate college is one of the biggest decisions a typical American family can make. And for too many years, information about the quality of American higher education has been monopolized by one publication, U.S. News & World Report. We offer an alternative.

The report lists 569 (take that Princeton Review) undergraduate institutions based on the quality of the education they provide, and how much their students achieve. A quarter of the overall score is based on 7 million student evaluations of courses and instructors, as recorded on RateMyProfessors.com. Another 25 percent depends on how many of the school's alumni, adjusted for enrollment, are listed among the notable people in Who's Who in America. The other half of the score is based on the average amount of student debt at graduation, the percentage of students graduating in four years, and the number of students or faculty who have won nationally competitive awards like Rhodes Scholarships or Nobel Prizes.

If the various guides above still don't help you find the best college, at least you can learn which ones to avoid--or so say the editors of Radar magazine (which covers "pop, politics, scandal, and style"). The September issue of Radar features its "annual semi-scientific guide to the worst colleges in America."

Every September suburban mailboxes across the nation are stuffed with earnest periodicals that rank academia's most elite institutions. But it's not much of a challenge to identify America's best colleges. For millions of students whose SAT results place them south of Stanford, identifying the worst colleges seems like a far more valuable service.

This pull-no-punches list is not for the fainthearted, and contains some content that is potentially NSFW.  To create the guide, the editors say they used the Princeton Review, U.S. News & World Report, stats from the U.S. Department of Education, and a variety of online sources.

Like all the guides and ranking systems, this one should be taken with a grain of salt.