Like a catwalk. Photo: Beraldo Leal

Yesterday, the Atlantic Wire reported that, according to the dating turned data gurus at Date My School, the “hottest” school in the nation, as ranked by a jury of their peers, is the School of the Visual Arts, followed by Queens College. Among the Ivies, Columbia ranked as the third college. This piqued our curiosity: We’d assumed some Sunbelt or Big Ten school would take the crown. Were the country’s most attractive young adults really walking among us swaddled in puffy down jackets? And so, even though we knew a post on hot college students would never generate good traffic on the Internet, we reached out to Shreshth Dugar, the site’s marketing director, to see if they’d compiled a New York–specific ranking. Lo and behold, they had.

There are, of course, some caveats to consider when perusing these graphs. Notions of “hotness” are obviously entirely subjective, as our mother, and hopefully yours, always stressed. The sample size of Date My School users is limited, though it has about 25,000 students in New York, a fairly solid data set. As for methodology, Dugar explained that they’d done a qualitative study on what people’s first instinct is when they find a picture on somebody’s profile attractive: “Do they IM them, or inbox them, or save their profiles? It turns out our first reaction is to save people’s profiles that we find attractive, so that we can come back to them later, or have them in our loop, or whatever. This is standard behavior across most of the dating platforms.” Using that, they created a weighted ratio by dividing the number of users of a school saved by other users by the numbers of profiles in that particular school with pictures.

As you can see, SVA was apparently carried to its national title on the strength of its artsy dudes, while Queens College seems to be a hotbed of attractiveness. Should make for some excellent brochure opportunities.