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A model that accounts for high school students' college selection was tested. The ideal point preference model proposes that students prefer the college that most approximates their conception of the ideal college. Also assessed was the extent to which students' academic orientations (vocational, academic, collegiate, or nonconformist) affect their evaluations of institutional characteristics that affect college choice. A total of 408 college-bound high school seniors from 16 Staten Island (New York) schools were administered the College Image Questionnaire. Factor analysis identified four characteristics linked to college choice: academic standards and reputation, religious emphasis and paternalism, being expensive and inconvenient, and social opportunity. Correlation analysis between students' actual college preferences and the rank order of preferences predicted by the model revealed that students applied the model in academic decision-making to a moderate extent. Colleges can employ multidimensional scaling to identify characteristics that students seek in a college as well as their images of local colleges. The college may then decide to shift or project its image close to students' ideals. (SW)

A model that accounts for high school students' college selection was tested. The ideal point preference model proposes that students prefer the college that most approximates their conception of the ideal college. Also assessed was the extent to which students' academic orientations (vocational, academic, collegiate, or nonconformist) affect their evaluations of institutional characteristics that affect college choice. A total of 408 college-bound high school seniors from 16 Staten Island (New York) schools were administered the College Image Questionnaire. Factor analysis identified four characteristics linked to college choice: academic standards and reputation, religious emphasis and paternalism, being expensive and inconvenient, and social opportunity. Correlation analysis between students' actual college preferences and the rank order of preferences predicted by the model revealed that students applied the model in academic decision-making to a moderate extent. Colleges can employ multidimensional scaling to identify characteristics that students seek in a college as well as their images of local colleges. The college may then decide to shift or project its image close to students' ideals. (SW)

As the several specific applications in this paper demonstrate, multidimensional scaling provides a long-needed means for investigating and describing spatial relationships among speech varieties. It is especially applicable to the relationships among varieties of a single language (or more properly, linguistic "cline"), which, as is generally known, are poorly described by the hierarchical mode of classification commonly used in comparative linguistics. But multidimensional scaling may also frequently be used to describe spatial variation which has persisted among distinct but related languages and which cannot be adequately described by an otherwise well-motivated hierarchical classification. These conclusions are illustrated by the application of multidimensional scaling to lexicostatistical percentages within four linguistic groups, located in the Philippines, Africa, and North America. (Author)