Culture

Date My School Identifies the Nation's 'Hottest' Colleges

DateMySchool.com is a website founded in November 2010 by Columbia University MBA classmates, Balazs Aexa and Jean Meyer, to help college students meet both within and outside of their own schools.

By Jen Doll
This article is from the archive of our partner .

DateMySchool.com is a website founded in November 2010 by two Columbia University MBA classmates, Balazs Aexa and Jean Meyer, to help college students meet both within and outside of their own schools. As Hannah Miet wrote in The New York Times last year, "Date My School offers a highly selective shortcut to love for students who are fluent in social media but too entrenched in their studies for much of an actual social life."

It seems that the site has been a success. DateMySchool.com is now "the largest college dating website ever," according to Shreshth Dugar, marketing director of the site, which counts its lifetime users as numbering nearly 100,000. "On any given night, there are more than 50,000 active users," he says. They hail from more than 1,000 schools, but as Dugar explains, the site's most solid presence comes from 80 schools, particularly in New York, where the site began, as well as the Ivy Leagues. "But we are doubling in size every month," he adds.

With that membership comes extensive data. Dugar realized that, given the sample sizes involved on the site, a ratings system could be developed to determine the, well, "hotness" of the students using the site. He explained, "One of the biggest luxuries of growing so fast is finally we have access to a large pool of users that we can compile interesting data."

Hotness, of course, is subjective, but the math ensures that the hottest schools are not simply those with the most users. If the men or women at a university are deemed "hot" by this ranking, it means their profile photos are most frequently saved by others, accounting for differences in numbers of users at each school.

Below, find graphs for the "hottest" men and women of the Ivy Leagues, and nationally -- according to DateMySchool.com

SVA = School of Visual Arts, QC = Queens College, BC = Boston College, CCNY = City College of New York, IUP = Indiana University of Pennsylvania

UMN = University of Minnesota Duluth; QC = Queens College, CCNY = City College of New York, CMU = Central Michigan University

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.
Jen Doll is a former staff writer for The Wire. She is the author of Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest.