The University of Michigan calls itself home of the leaders and best. And while the catchphrase might smack of arrogance, there is plenty of support that this school does lead the pack and is one of the best — application rates, research grants, alumni base and college rankings.

The U.S. News and World Report lists the University as the 26th-best institution of higher education in the country, wedged comfortably between the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Southern California, respectively.

Forbes Magazine, meanwhile, listed the University at 161st, right between Lake Forest College and Wisconsin Lutheran College.

In the world of college rankings, neck-breaking double takes abound. But it’s the nature of the business that discrepancies exist — why would Forbes begin ranking schools if its list was going to match up almost exactly with U.S. News, the leading rankings publication? The flip side to that, of course, is how could a dozen different publications differentiate their ranking systems enough to make printing them worthwhile? The trick is widely varying methodologies so that the same qualities that got a university in one publication’s top 20 barely warrant a ranking above 200 to another publication.

College rankings might not be what they appear to be, but they can’t be written off altogether. At least prospective students don’t think so. According to Michigan Cooperative Institutional Research data, 41.6 percent of students entering the University in Fall 2008 said that rankings were “very important” in deciding where to attend, compared with only 3.4 percent ten years ago. The same data has the percentage of students answering “very important” at 33.5 percent five years ago.

The importance — perceived importance, at least — of college rankings is as objective as the rankings are subjective. To decide which publications give the University a fair shake and which are just talking trash, it’s crucial to look at the methodology of the ranking system. Here is a breakdown of four very different approaches to ranking the nation’s colleges.

U.S. News and World Report

Top three schools: Harvard, Princeton, Yale, respectively.

Michigan: 26

Undoubtedly the recognized authority on college rankings, the U.S. News list can be likened to the hyper-masculine, turbo-Neanderthal fourth-grader that dominates the blacktop and crushes the meek competition. But name recognition does not necessarily translate into respect.

The Education Conservancy, an education reform organization, has an open letter on its website signed by several university presidents that criticizes the U.S. News rankings as “misleading” and says that its system tends to “overlook the importance of a student in making education happen and overweight the importance of a university’s prestige in that process.”

As detailed on its website (college.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com), U.S. news obtains its rankings by averaging together differently weighted components. First is peer assessment, weighed at 25 percent, for which university administrators rate schools’ academic programs on a 1-5 scale. Second is retention rate, weighed at 20 percent, which measures how many students graduate in six years or less and how many freshmen return the next year. Another 20 percent is faculty resources, consisting of class size, faculty pay, the highest college degrees obtained by professors, student-faculty ratio and percentage of fulltime faculty.

Then, there is student selectivity (measured by standardized test scores), accounting for 15 percent. The next 10 percent is financial resources or “average spending per student on instruction, research, student services, and related education expenditures.” Five percent accounts for graduation rate performance, which the publication calculates by finding the difference between the year’s graduation rate and the rate U.S. News had predicted for that class. The final 5 percent considers the rate of alumni donations.

Unsurprisingly, Michigan boasts statistics justifiable for its not-too-shabby rank: according to collegeresults.org, the University had a graduation rate of 86.9 percent in 2006, below only that of UCLA and UC-Berkley, institutions that beat Michigan in the U.S. News rankings.

Still, some statistics do not bode well for the University’s rank. Michigan had a student-faculty ratio of 15 to 1 last year, while Princeton boasted a 5 to 1 ratio and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had a 6 to 1 ratio, according to a North Carolina State University website devoted to following higher education. Michigan also ranks outside the top 30 institutions concerning alumni donations with a rate of 18 percent. Princeton, Yale, Harvard and other institutions ranked higher by U.S.