There will no doubt be dancing in the streets of Pasadena this week, following the news that the California Institute of Technology has leapfrogged above the usual Ivy League contenders to top the college rankings presented each year by the news magazine US News & World Report.

Such a party is due not because of the significance of the event itself — which is slight — but because everyone at Caltech seems to need a break. According to US News, classes at the science and engineering school can often last until 2 a.m. One inmate describes Caltech life thus: “Grades, social life, sleep: pick two.” The magazine had to delve back 15 years for an example of interesting non-curricular activity at the school. The example in question was the 1984 Rose Bowl football game between UCLA and Illinois, at which Caltech undergraduates — lacking a football team of their own — reportedly hacked into the scoreboard to make it read “Caltech 38, MIT 9”.

On the surface, at least, Caltech officials are managing to keep their excitement under control. “I don't think the rankings are terribly meaningful, but they are useful,” vice-provost David Goodstein told US News. “It's like winning the Rose Bowl. It doesn't change the school or its characteristics, but it's a nice thing to have. I don't doubt that we'll use it in advertising to attract students and impress donors.”

Potential students are certainly paying attention. For high-school students spending the end of their summer vacation in what is now the traditional way — in the basement, playing computer games and surfing the web — all roads now lead to http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/corank.htm. The site has been swamped beneath the weight of visitors.

When they get to the site, they will discover that US News has explained and qualified its findings with admirable forthrightness. It points out, for example, that Caltech has surpassed last year's joint winners — Harvard, Princeton and Yale — chiefly on account of changes not in school performance, but in study methodology.

This year, instead of simply ranking the schools in order of success in each category — for example, amount spent per student — and adding up the rankings, US News weights the institutional scores to reflect the extent of each school's achievements in each category. Caltech, for example, spends an astonishing $192,000 per student, more than twice as much as any of its rivals. It has a student-to-faculty ratio of 3:1, against 8:1 at Harvard, for example. By giving weight to Caltech's overwhelming resource advantage, the new technique has propelled the smaller school into pole position.

Until next year, that is, when fresh methodological alterations will no doubt give US News a new winner and a fresh blast of publicity. Changing the method is good: if it stayed the same, the rankings probably would too, and where are the headlines in that? In any case, Nature recommends that the youth of America should pause for a while before making that fateful selection. Next month, the Princeton Review will publish its own highly scientific “party school” rankings, which are at least based on a survey of real students. Last year, the State University of New York at Albany came top, whereas Caltech was nowhere to be seen.