A universal university ranking from the preferences of the applicants

A methodology is presented to rank universities on the basis of the applicants' revealed preferences. We exploit a crucial feature of the centralised admissions system to higher education in Hungary: a student is admitted to the first programme where the score-limit is achieved. It makes possible to derive a partial preference order of each applicant. Our approach integrates the information from all students participating in the system and is free of subjective weights and of an arbitrary selection of criteria. The suggested procedure is implemented for ranking faculties in the Hungarian higher education between 2001 and 2016. We demonstrate that the ranking given by the least squares method has favourable theoretical properties, and performs well in practice.