The best-known ranking of colleges throughout the country is via the U.S. News & World Report, which releases a new list every year. This year's list came out on Wednesday.

But President Obama and his administration have something else in mind for highlighting how academic institutions should be measured -- a new "college scorecard" initiative, which the president announced today (Sept. 12). The initiative won't rank colleges and universities across the U.S., BuzzFeed News reported, but it will spotlight which aspects of each institution are worthwhile and which are not.

As James Kvaal, the deputy director of domestic policy at the White House, explained to reporters: "The current system is one where we reward colleges based on what they spend, for turning away students instead of enrolling more of them. These are the wrong incentives to be giving our colleges, and the wrong message to send our students."

The new college scorecard will instead value schools as "exceptional" if they're more affordable (or have more access to affordability), if they count more poor and first-generation students as graduates and if their graduates earn more in their post-graduation jobs.

Here's how it works.

Visit the new college scorecard website and input the specifications.

For example: Bachelor's degree, communications/journalism, mid-sized school in New York State (because I went to Syracuse University for grad school).

Take note of the differences in the school breakdowns.

Annual average cost, graduation rate and salary after attending are represented visually as charts, with the black bar representing the national average.

Go deeper into the numbers.

You can compare via how many students are paying tuition with federal loans, the typical debt incurred upon graduating and what an average student pays back per month.

But where does this information come from? Kvaal said some of it has already been available to the public, but some hasn't, making this scorecard the "first reliable nationwide data" on how much graduates are actually earning after college. The data was reportedly pulled from the IRS and federal loan data, not self-reported surveys.

The bottom line here is that the scorecard is not meant to be the White House's ranking of schools, but rather a tool for other organizations -- or journalists and researchers -- to interpret the data. And 11 organizations will soon unveil their services for doing exactly that, making this data more easily accessible and centralized.