Every year, millions of magazines are sold upon the release of the annual school rankings issue. Businessweek, US News & World Reports, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and others conduct huge surveys capturing extensive data in their effort to rank the relative value of each school.

Anyone who has spent time perusing these rankings surely has noticed one thing – they are all completely different!

Check out the top 10 U.S. schools from a sampling of publications:

Every publication has vastly different and subjective criteria for its ranking system. No clear winners and losers emerge. How are we supposed to make sense of this mess?

While I am definitely no expert at ranking schools, I have one strategy (albeit admittedly imperfect) for thinking about relative value of various schools – look to the “market” for ranking. It’s quite simple really. If students were given a choice of schools to attend, where would they go? For example, of students who received admissions offers from both Wharton and HBS, I would guess that the vast majority choose HBS (with the exception of those hard-core financiers). Students choosing between Wharton and Columbia, on the other hand, would more often than not choose Wharton. One way to get some sense for how schools rank using this criterion is to look at the percentage of admitted student accepting their admissions offer.

Of course, there are many sampling factors making this strategy imperfect. Different people are looking for different things in a school – those interested in finance will likely favour Wharton and Columbia, management students may tend towards HBS or MIT, and entrepreneurs will look to Stanford or MIT. Another important decision factors is location - some prefer the West Coast chill (Stanford, Berkley, UCLA) while others crave the hustle and bustle of the East Coast (Columbia, NYU, Wharton).

How would you rank the top schools? What are the most important criteria to consider?

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