I was recently flipping through the New York Times and happened upon an editorial entitled "How to Choose a College".  Getting into this process myself, I decided to read farther.  The article, which can be found here, explains the author's [Frank Bruni] opinions about his niece's quest to find the right college.  Bruni's opinion is that kids today get bogged down in advice in the form of numbers.  Statistics, test scores, grades.  And he thinks that this is an ineffective method at actually finding the best school for an individual.

Although I'm not very far into it, I am in the midst of trying to find good schools for me.  From the perspective of the student, I find myself relying a lot on the same statistics which Bruni abhors, not necessarily because I think its the best way to find a good school, but because its manageable.  As I write this I'm sitting next to a Fiske college guide, which gives reviews of hundreds of schools in 850 full sized pages of writing.  When its a challenge for me just to find time to do my reading for high school, there's no way I could reasonably put in the time to take a detailed look at all those schools.  So personally I don't think there is a problem with relying on numbers to get a sense for what you want to look at in detail.  As long as you look at some other factors before actually making a final decision and sending in an application, I think trusting some bare statistics and facts is necessary in today's world of finding colleges.