But this can lead to some absurd and potentially alarming conclusions.

In Virginia, the top-ranked college based on graduates’ first-year income isn’t the nationally known Washington and Lee University, the University of Richmond, the College of William and Mary or even Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia. It’s the Jefferson College of Health Sciences.

“People are desperate to measure something, so they seize on the wrong things,” Mark Edmundson, a professor of English at the University of Virginia (PayScale, 76), told me this week. “I’m not against people making a living or prospering. But if the objective of an education is to ‘know yourself,’ it’s going to be hard to measure that.”

Professor Edmundson is author of the recent book “Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education,” which argues that education should transform students by challenging and expanding their conceptions of themselves. “Self-realization doesn’t just mean sitting around discussing Plato and Socrates,” he said. “It means figuring out what job or profession would I be best at and what I would enjoy. Too many people are just aiming for a high salary. They struggle through college, they don’t like their classes, they don’t like their job and they end up failing. If they had taken the time to discover themselves, they might have ended up happy and prosperous.”

Andrew Delbanco, director of American studies at Columbia University (PayScale, 54) and author of “College, What Was, Is, and Should Be,” said: “It’s understandable and entirely legitimate that students and families are worrying about the ‘return’ on their investment in college — especially as tuition continues to rise too high and too fast. But there are lots of troubling questions that follow. Should returns in dollars be the only measure of educational value? What does that say about the traditional mission of college to educate young people for engaged citizenship, and to provide opportunities for self-fulfillment in ways that do not necessarily line up with income and status?”

Professor Delbanco added that a focus on prospective income to the exclusion of other values “runs a high risk of distorting the college itself and pushing it to become a referral or employment agency even more than it already is.”

Even the president of top-ranked Harvey Mudd, Maria Klawe, sounded a cautionary note. “We’re proud we’re getting the recognition, but it has very little to do with what we do.” She noted that Mudd students were required to take 30 percent of their course in the humanities, social sciences or arts, which she said was the highest for any engineering and technology school in the country. Mudd’s demanding curriculum and tough grading standards mean “our students aren’t picking us for the salaries. They could study at a much less rigorous place and earn the same salaries.”

Still, she acknowledged that “parents are relieved their offspring will earn something.” She said the median starting salary for last year’s graduates who took jobs was $77,500, and 23 graduates, or more than 10 percent of the graduating class, had six-figure starting salaries. Dr. Klawe said that a few years ago, a student landed a $280,000 starting salary after designing a high-speed trading algorithm during his summer internship.