You said you were interested in methodological ideas, so I'm going to add another comment. Based on the head-to-head rankings of MIT versus other top schools, i

You said you were interested in methodological ideas, so I'm going to add another comment. Based on the head-to-head rankings of MIT versus other top schools, it looks like MIT should have an Elo rating on your scale somewhere around 1800, which would give it a ranking somewhere around #4, which seems intuitively reasonable. But it is possible that MIT loses more than it should (if it were 1800) against much lower ranked colleges (e.g. Boston University (Elo 1434), which your site gives winning against MIT 28% of the time). What might be happening is that MIT accepts some fraction of students who are weaker academically for a variety of reasons, but those students are intimidated by MIT's reputation for being academically intense, and decide not to attend. My guess is that among strong students (e.g. students with higher SAT scores), MIT's rating would be much higher than among all students. This is also consistent with your suggestion that Avery et.al. used students from elite high schools. So if you want to get ratings that are more in line with what people think of the colleges (e.g. where is a good student who gets into both A and B likely to go) you should probably consider students who have high SATs, or alternatively students who get into a lot of top-ranked colleges, to be more "valuable" and thus to be more important for the rating.