U.S. News & World Report’s position at the top of the college-rankings heap may be on the line.

The magazine’s influential rankings are being challenged by a quartet of scholars who seek to apply what is essentially a market test to evaluating colleges and universities.

The new rankings, reported last week in the Chronicle of Higher Education, emerged from a paper by four scholars who developed a system based on so-called revealed preferences – where those high-school students who were accepted at two or more colleges ultimately chose to enroll.

Princeton, which was ranked first by U.S. News, fell to sixth in the new rankings, while Duke plummeted to 19th from fifth and Georgetown jumped to 16th from 25th.

The study was based on information gathered from 3,240 high-school students who graduated from selective and competitive American high schools in 2000.

Schools in New York City were relatively stable in the new ranking system, with NYU dropping to 39th place from 32nd and Fordham to 74th from 70th, while Columbia inched up to eighth place from ninth.

Comparing the two lists side by side, it can be seen that the U.S. News chart takes ties into account – for example, Northwestern and Washington Universities tied for 11th place, with Brown following at 13. In the chart based on revealed preferences, there are no ties.

In addition, colleges and universities are lumped together in the list based on revealed preferences, whereas U.S. News ranks colleges and universities separately, on two different charts.

Historically, college-ranking systems have come under fire from people who say they encourage schools to manipulate their numbers, such as matriculation and admission rates, to gain higher standings. The authors of the new report – Christopher Avery of Harvard University, Mark Glickman of Boston University, Caroline Minter Hoxby of Harvard University, and Andrew Metrick of the University of Pennsylvania – attack rankings such as U.S. News’s for inducing “colleges to engage in distorted conduct that decreases the college’s real selectivity while increasing the college’s apparent selectivity.”

The authors said the model using revealed preferences, based on the formulas used to rank players at chess tournaments, creates an actual market measure by which to rank colleges. A ranking system based on students’ preferences, essentially the desirability level of each school, eliminates the need for the widely criticized “arbitrary” formulas used by U.S. News, they said.

An associate professor of health services at Boston University, Mr. Glickman, who oversaw the study’s statistical analysis, said: “You get a real sense of which schools are preferred to others based on what students actually do, rather than seeing a ranking based on specific, rather arbitrary characteristics, which can be manipulated by the colleges.”

Some see flaws in the study. The director of data research at U.S. News, Robert Morse, said the authors set up a false claim by which to criticize the newsmagazine. “We don’t use the matriculation rate anymore in our rankings – we dropped that two years ago,” he said.

He said the academics’ study, while it deserves to be looked at, “is in no way a substitute for what we’re doing.”

In response to the assertion that U.S. News’s data can be manipulated, Mr. Morse fired back that the new study could not be carried out nationally. “They made arrangements with guidance counselors to get admissions data,” he said, adding that the process could not be carried out on “a massive enough scale to get a statistically significant sample that is representative of all the high schools.”

An editor at Washington Monthly who last year wrote a skeptical critique of the college rankings system for Atlantic Monthly, Nicholas Confessore, said he thinks “all college rankings are stupid,” and the new one particularly so. “The authors are correct that college guides like U.S. News do not provide very useful evaluations of academic quality, but their rankings assume that high-school students, before they even get to college, are good judges of how good a school is,” Mr. Confessore said.

While colleges can manipulate the U.S. News rankings, he said, the “revealed preference” study is based in large part on a school’s reputation. “And when you’re talking about ‘reputation,'” Mr. Confessore said, “it’s the U.S. News rankings in the first place that produce these bogus and endlessly self-reinforcing estimations of how good a college is.”

In the end, he said, the study is just an extension of the U.S. News rankings. “This study,” the Washington journalist said, “is basically revealing how much the students have bought into the standard of quality that U.S. News puts out.”

A columnist for the Washington Post and Newsweek, Robert Samuelson, wrote a column called “In Praise of Rankings” for the summer 2004 “Kaplan College Guide. “While he said yesterday he strongly believes that rankings do a good job of “reflecting the status consciousness of American culture and society,” he worried that within the revealed-preference system, a school’s ranking “has more to do with its prestige and status, not so much with the quality of education.”