Among the elite private schools, tuition is driven by what the market will bear. It's that simple. They charge a higher tuition because they can. There is literature showing that colleges behave like any nonprofit institution. They raise as much as they can, and spend as much to improve offerings. Faced with the choice between attracting pouring money into financial aid or spending it on something to improve quality of offerings, they'll often opt for the latter choice.

Your college guide, which is the most popular in the country, is now about three decades old. Why did you first decide to make it?

I was the education editor of the New York Times in the late 1970s, and colleges were getting more aggressive in their marketing. Somebody needed to come in on the side of the consumer.

The guide was instantly controversial. Colleges were not used to having people be critical of them. We said, for example, that Syracuse was didn't put enough emphasis on undergrad education and that another newly-co-ed college wasn't a good place for women. Colleges weren't used to being criticized. They got mad. They also listened. Syracuse invested a huge amount in undergraduate education.

Your guide has ratings, but not rankings. Why?

I've always rated the schools on a one-to-five scale for Academics, Social Life, and Quality of Life. Originally I rated with stars. But people were adding up the stars to come out with a cumulative rating, and I didn't mean for that to happen. So I changed the symbols so people wouldn't add them up.

Then along came US News and they ranked schools. I think that's inappropriate. I don't do rankings. I do journalism. I go to a school. I ask the students, "What's it like at this school?" I write down what they say. I'm like a restaurant critic, but for colleges.

What's the problem with rankings?

First, "What's the best college?" is the wrong question. The right question is, "What's the best college for me?"

Second, the US News rankings measure wealth.There's a bias against quality public schools because they don't have tremendous endowments. That's wrong. So I think it's a great source of statistical information. If they said, "Here are the facts, use your own weighting system," it might be useful. But for millions of kids to buy into this system is wrong.

But readers can easily turn ratings into rankings. If a Fiske guide says one college's academics are five-out-of-five and another school is four-out-of-five, there's an implicit ranking there. The first school has better academics.

My system is admittedly subjective. But it's informed not by a mathematical formula but by what students tell me about the quality of an institution. US News measures reputations, which are uninformed. What students tell us about academic culture, how seriously it's taken is much more helpful, I think.