  A methodology is presented to rank universities on the basis of the lists of
programmes the students applied for. We exploit a crucial feature of the
centralised assignment system to higher education in Hungary: a student is
admitted to the first programme where the score limit is achieved. This makes
it possible to derive a partial preference order of each applicant. Our
approach integrates the information from all students participating in the
system, is free of multicollinearity among the indicators, and contains few ad
hoc parameters. The procedure is implemented to rank 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, is robust
with respect to the aggregation of preferences, and performs well in practice.
The suggested ranking is worth considering as a reasonable alternative to the
standard composite indices.
