Forbes, U.S. News & World Report, Princeton: You name it.

Each time a top-universities ranking is announced, students flock to social media to share their excitement, boasting about how their school compares with other in-state or rival schools. It doesn’t even have to be a prominent publication, and regardless, optimists will find a way to spin the numbers.

But that’s exactly what it is: just a number, as evidenced by the criteria Forbes uses in its annually published rankings.

The business magazine released its rankings this past week, placing the University 10th among public institutions and 53rd overall. The Urbana campus was ahead, in the public rankings, of University of Texas at Austin, University of Wisconsin at Madison and Indiana University.

While there’s no disputing that the University belongs with other top-tier institutions, Forbes’ rankings are just one organization’s thoughts and analyses about where each university belongs in respect to one another. Forbes has its own philosophies on what makes a university better than another, its own experts and its own criteria, a comprehensive one at that.

For example, 15 percent of the student satisfaction measure takes into account how instructors fare on Rate My Professors, where students identify the easiest and more difficult professors based on personal experience. However, rating a professor doesn’t necessarily translate over to how much a class and its content have helped further a student’s understanding of that particular subject.

Meanwhile, the post-graduate success measure, which accounts for 37.5 percent of the total ranking, is misleading. Fifteen percent is devoted to data from Payscale.com, which places too much value on salary, while 22.5 percent comes from the America’s Leaders List which, again, places too much emphasis on an exclusive list of leaders with achievements far from the reach of many graduates.

The rankings look at return on investment, rather than test scores and admitted GPA, but it leaves out any metric about landing a job. Employment within six months of graduation is this generation’s No. 1 goal after graduation, especially in the final years of college.

Forbes’ rankings miss the boat on what success is: College’s role is to help you prepare for your entrance into the working world, not necessarily to develop you into a top executive, politician or engineer. In another example, just over one-tenth of the total ranking is devoted to nationally competitive awards. Does a school rank less for not having a small science or engineering program? And would a school rank lower for a program that doesn’t compete, such as a strong language program?

However, the magazine did nail the graduation rates and student debt categories.

One further addition might be useful: How does the university use the state’s dollars? How much return investment is the state getting for each dollar it’s giving to public institutions? For example, many post-grads from the University try to find jobs in Chicago. At other universities, in smaller cities, that is less of the case. So how is that factored in to generating dollars for the state’s economy?

Not all rankings are the same, and not one is more correct or accurate than another. They might help students and employers estimate the quality of a school’s education, but no one should swear by them. They really just are numbers.