For years, college ranking systems such as the U.S. News and World Report’s have informed students and families about the academic aspects of choice universities.

A recent study submitted to the National Bureau of Economic Research takes a different approach to categorizing universities — ranking them based on the college choices of 3,200 high school seniors from the class of 2000.

Student participants in the study were desirable for many colleges. They had an average SAT score of 1357 and 46 percent of the participants received merit-based scholarships.

The study is formatted such that colleges and universities compete with each other on a win-loss basis. According to the study, colleges and universities are in a “tournament” in which the university a student chooses is the winner.

“A reasonable inference is that the school that wins the multi-player tournament is preferred to the other schools in that competition,” the study said.

Despite the authors’ fresh method of ranking colleges, many question the validity of the study, including some University of Wisconsin students.

UW, which is ranked 32nd in the nation according to the 2005 edition of U.S. News and World Report’s “America’s Best Colleges,” ranked 79th in the Bureau’s new study.

UW sophomore Scott Vick said in some respects the study comes across as a popularity contest.

“Is New York City the best city in the country because the most people have chosen to live there?” he asked, adding there are other deciding factors as well, including atmosphere, safety and job availability.

However, Mark Glickman, a statistics professor at Boston University, and one of the authors of the study, said it should not be viewed as a popularity contest.

“Realistically, is the student choosing the school because they’re picking the more popular school? Probably not,” he said. “They’re picking schools that are important to them for various reasons.”

Glickman also emphasized he does not think ranking systems are necessarily a wise method of choosing universities.

“All these ranking systems I think are giving a rough feel for various ways of understanding the qualities of these colleges,” he said, adding every decision should be custom-tailored to the individual.

However, many factors play into students’ choice of university — from academics to environment to quality of partying. Glickman said the intention of the study was not to address these issues.

“We have a very specific criterion and we’re not claiming that our measure is better than any others, but we’re being very upfront of what the criterion is,” Glickman said. “It’s more a criterion of what the perception of the school is.”

Glickman said if a product is chosen more often in comparison to other products, it must be more preferred.

John Lucas, a spokesperson for UW, said this, and all studies, “should be taken with a grain of salt.”

Students looking into the possibility of going to college should research independently, Lucas said, adding they should make an effort to visit universities and speak with professors and administrators to make more informed decisions.