First, some cultural accounting: A Google search on the Ivy League yields about 3.9 million hits, an average of more than 487,000 for each of the eight Ivy League universities. By contrast, a search on community colleges produces 21 million hits, or an average of 21,190 for each of the 981 two-year colleges in America. By these crude statistics the Ivy League carries roughly 23 times the cultural zeitgeist of the nation's entire community college system that enrolls 11.6 million students.

My guess is that a substantial number of those 487,000 hits per Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the rest are somehow related to students applying for admission to Ivy League colleges or searching for every conceivable angle to aid that cause. You can tell this by the business decisions of Google advertisers. Scores of educational consultants, test-prep firms and other organizations that bank upon the elite college admissions game are willing to spend big money on the hunch that students and parents Googling the Ivy League are looking for Ivy Success and Who Gets into the Ivys -- to name but two such sponsored ads.

Here's another interesting piece of cultural accounting: Advertisers paying for sponsored search ads on Yahoo on April 10 would have to bid just 76 cents per click for the modest keyword "First Generation College Student." But to get listed among the top ads for those searching "the best college," advertisers would have to pay $17.66 per click. That ought to tell you something about where our culture's priorities are.

But what sort of proportionality and rationality would induce untold millions of young people and their parents to stake their personal and family identity on whether Jane or Johnny gets into Harvard, Yale or Princeton, when just a tiny fraction of those families have even a remote chance of success, owing to an elitist system that favors wealth and privilege above all else?

We've all heard the stories of the seemingly perfect student, with perfect test scores and perfect extracurriculars whose plans for a perfect life have been utterly ruined because H-Y-P or Williams or Brown rejected them. For some families, the rejected application to an elite university is a matter of shame, as Jay Mathews of the Washington Post discovered. ""How does she hold her head up high?" a McLean, Virginia, parent asked after her high-achieving daughter learned that she was rejected at the University of Virginia, Carnegie Mellon, Occidental and Pepperdine, and was accepted at just two small colleges in Virginia.

You can hardly blame the parents and students for succumbing to the hype because as a society we've done a terrible job at creating institutions and systems, public or private, that provide families with real information about how well colleges actually teach, engage students in learning, and contribute to the public good. Give U.S. News its due. The magazine stepped into the information void and created a popular product -- albeit a black hole that is sucking the life out of American higher education, adding fuel to the prestige-at-any-cost mentality.

One would hardly know it from the outsized attention the press and the public pays to admission to the highly ranked, brand-name colleges, which often reject 8 or 9 of every 10 applicants, but the average rejection rate for all four-year colleges and universities in the United States is only about one in three, according to the National Association of College Admissions Counseling, known as NACAC. In other words, the typical American college or university accepts 7 of every 10 students who apply. But the popular obsession with the elite institutions means that that just one-sixth of all colleges and universities -- the "selective" ones that accept 50 percent or fewer applicants -- receive almost one-third of the total applications to four-year colleges in the country.

And, according to NACAC's figuring, this highly charged environment promises to become even tenser in coming years, considering the high payoffs in lifetime earnings of college degrees relative to high school diplomas and community college degrees. "The economic demand for a college education will only rise," David Hawkins, director of public policy for NACAC told Mathews. "I do not think anyone should count on an admission environment that is any less crowded than the one that we are experiencing now."

There could, however, be a silver lining in all this. In fact, the information about colleges that would actually be useful to parents and students does currently exist. The problem -- and this isn't U.S. News's fault -- is that most colleges and universities don't want this information to see the light of day.

Perhaps the leading contender to upset the apple cart is a relatively obscure project called the National Survey of Student Engagement, known as Nessie, which is housed at Indiana University. Nessie's founders launched the project with a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts in 1999, even then recognizing the precarious direction that the U.S. News prestige-driven ranking machine was leading higher education. The founders developed several benchmarks that studies suggested were powerfully related to effective teaching and learning, including a challenging academic curriculum, personal interaction between teachers and students, and a supportive campus environment.

Noticeably absent from the Nessie calculus are measures of institutional selectivity that dominate the U.S. News rankings. Indeed, Nessie's core idea is quintessentially American and meritocratic: What should matter in college rankings are how much students learn during four years of undergraduate study, not the SAT scores of entering freshman or the academic "reputation" of the university in the minds of university presidents and admissions officers.

For higher education's insiders who know what Nessie measures, it's not a surprise that there's virtually no statistically observable relationship between how well a college performs on Nessie and its ranking on U.S. News. High prestige doesn't necessarily make for a good college. Take, for instance, Jackson State University, a predominately African American institution in Jackson, Mississippi. According to America's Best Colleges, parents and students should probably shun Jackson State as a no-name, no-count school. And yet, Jackson State kicks butt on Nessie's benchmarks of student engagement.

How do we know this? Jackson State makes public its Nessie scores, as do a modest number of other colleges and universities. But for most of the higher education industry, a college's Nessie performance is a secret. This secrecy is most glaring among the big-name schools. No doubt, the elite schools that U.S. News brands as excellent have the most to lose were the public to have real information about how well they do by their students. To U.S. News's great credit, the magazine has tried to obtain Nessie data on colleges, but just small fraction of institutions have answered the magazine's call.

The hypocrisy here is ripe. While many colleges and universities disdain the U.S. News rankings as superficial and misguided, the higher education industry has failed utterly to provide the public with information about its institutions that parents and students would find useful in making choices based upon educational values and not rankings hype. As matters stand, consumers must contend with a market that provides bad information about colleges from a popular icon, or good information that's top secret.

I'm hardly a fan of George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind-obsessed U.S. Department of Education or its secretary, Margaret Spellings. But the Spellings Commission, which recently concluded its examination of America's troubled system of higher education - particularly in terms of access and affordability -- seems to get it. Spellings seems to understand that the federal government could play a powerful role in helping to bridge the gap between the information-poor world of "America's Best Colleges" and the information-rich world of Nessie as well as other lesser known efforts to gauge student learning and engagement while in college.

In its final report, the Spellings Commission called upon higher education to be cleansed of the "America's Best Colleges" mentality and "change from a system primarily based on reputation to one based on performance." What's more, the Commission recommended that the government create a new "consumer-friendly" database that would provide that information to the public.

The Washington Monthly, the smallish political magazine in D.C., also gets it, having bravely created an alternative college-rankings guide that eschews U.S. News's prestige-driven measures for those such as community service, research, and social mobility - measures that attempt to assess the degree to which universities contribute to the larger public good and not simply their bank accounts. (A methodological head flip that, for instance, demotes Harvard from the top national university on U.S. News to 28th on the Washington Monthly, and elevates the University of California San Diego from 32nd to sixth.)

What's more, I can even be convinced that the editors at U.S. News get it, too. Despite its strong-armed tactics to preserve its college-rankings franchise, the magazine has demonstrated a willingness to adjust its yardstick to include useful information such as the Nessie results. Love it or hate it, U.S. News has established the franchise and the framework that is already widely available to the public, and, bless the profit-motive, Mortimer Zuckerman probably doesn't give a damn how he ranks colleges as long as it sells magazines.

It's now time for the higher education industry, nudged by the guiding hammer of Margaret Spellings, to abandon the hypocrisy and answer Zuckerman's call.

Could a tipping point be near?