A pair of economists at the College of William and Mary have devised a new way of comparing colleges' graduation rates--a method, borrowed from business analysis, that they believe is fairer and more useful than the techniques used by "U.S. News & World Report" and the Education Trust. That general technique of regression analysis underlies the "graduation-rate performance" measure in the "U.S. News" rankings, as well as the comparisons published at the College Results Online Web site, which was developed by the Education Trust, an independent research group that works for higher academic achievement among underprivileged groups. Mr. Feldman and Mr. Archibald believe that a technique known as production-frontier analysis is superior to traditional regression analysis. In production-frontier analysis, scholars look for companies--or, in this case, colleges--that are most efficient at a given level of "input" characteristics. Those highly productive institutions are said to "define the efficient frontier." If another college with identical characteristics--say, average SAT scores of 1150 and per-student expenditures of $5,000--has a worse graduation rate, it is said to lag behind the frontier.