In today's Inside Higher Ed:  Creating the Anti-Rankings, by Scott Jaschik:

College Speaks [is] a tool being created by the Education Conservancy, an organization that has been fighting the many commercial forces that have become big players in college admissions and attempting to make educational counseling central to the process. The group, led by Lloyd Thacker, has been best known in recent years for urging colleges to refuse to fill out the “reputational” surveys used by U.S. News, which are widely seen as invalid by educators. While that campaign may be having some success with college presidents — fewer of whom appear to be filling out the surveys — it hasn’t diminished the rankings’ popularity.

Recognizing that — and also responding to the requests of some rankings critics, who have said they want to put forward a positive alternative — the Education Conservancy has been working for a year on a new approach, an explicitly anti-rankings system for the college search.

An early version was presented for the first time in public Thursday at the annual meeting of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. It is a much more individualized, education focused approach, with less reliance on pure statistics, and the focus is on the fit between student and college, not the superiority of one college over another. The concept drew considerable praise from high school counselors and college admissions officers.

But even amid the praise for the project, there was also skepticism, primarily about practicalities rather than the concept. Some noted that there are many other sources of college information — already taxing colleges’ time — and that many students appear to gravitate toward less educational tools. And there is also discussion about how to build a permanent infrastructure to support the project, which Thacker and others say shouldn’t stay at the Education Conservancy permanently.