Imagine your idea of Stanford University was illustrated in Paint By Number.

Look for the "4th" and color in our standing among peer American colleges. Find the "7th" and fill in our ranking in the list of best colleges for African-Americans. For "top 20," shade in our status as a queer-friendly school. Add in a few nuanced strokes, brush in "1st" to indicate our status as having the Overall Happiest Students, and voila.

"Reputation is like a mosaic," said David Demarest, vice president of Public Affairs at Stanford. "It is drawn from many different dimensions; then, somehow, it sort of congeals into a snapshot of an idea that people have of Stanford."

But is the portrait of Stanford University, or any other university listed in these rankings, an accurate one? That's the question today's students ask themselves as they wade through the information overload of college research. Magazines like U.S. News and World Report claim to simplify the process by quantifying numerous factors into a simple rankings list.

U.S. News and World Report, which takes into account various "indicators of academic quality," placed Stanford fourth this summer in its annual college rankings, tied with Cal Tech and MIT. In case you're curious, "indicators of academic quality" boil down to peer assessment scores, student/faculty ratios, class size, selectivity, SAT/ACT percentiles, alumni giving, financial resources, graduation and retention rates, and percentage of faculty who work full time.

Though such rankings may indeed affect a student's decision to attend

Stanford, Demarest emphatically denied that the University takes any specific steps to gain a higher rank.

"We never really subscribed to the U.S. News and World Report thesis," Demarest said. "There may be a best university for an individual student, but there is not a "best" university in the total sense of the word."

Rather than defining the best university for all students, some magazines compile lists of universities suited to a racial subset of students. This year, Black Enterprise magazine named Stanford University the seventh-best college for African Americans. Those rankings reflected the percentage of black undergraduate students, graduation rates, and evaluations of social and academic environment by African American professionals in higher education.

Stanford has been the highest-ranked historically non-black college since the list's conception in 1999. But, for the first time ever, Harvard University ranked higher than Stanford on the 2007 list, jumping from last year's 11th to this year's fourth best college for African Americans.

"I'm surprised Harvard is ranked above us this year," said Jan Barker-Alexander, assistant dean of students and director of the Black Community Center. But like Demarest, she maintained that Stanford is motivated by a deeper impetus than rankings.

Barker-Alexander lauded Stanford's cultural programs like a Black Community Service Center, an ethnic theme house, an African and African American studies major, Committee on Black Performing Arts, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project. The combination of programs, unique to Stanford, shows a celebration of black culture unprecedented in any Ivy League schools, she said. Harvard, for example, does not have both a community center and an ethnic theme house.

"There's a culture of academic excellence, understanding, and respect for diversity within diversity in the black community at Stanford," Barker-Alexander said. "Stanford has a special community that's woven into the fabric of the institution."

Stanford's celebration of other communities on campus continues to garner the University spots in other specialized college lists. The Advocate, a LGBT news site, has published "The Advocate College Guide for LGBT Students," a book that profiles 100 of the country's best campuses for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students. After reviewing Stanford policies, the campus climate and reading undergraduate and graduate testimonials, the magazine placed Stanford in its top 20. Ben Davidson, director of the LGBT Community Resources Center, said he is glad to be included in the book and hopes that it will be a useful tool for high school students, but warned against putting too much stock in the publication.

"The book isn't a ranking per se, but of course all such assessments should always be taken with a grain of salt," he said.

Hispanic Magazine also named Stanford the nation's sixth Best College for Latinos, citing academic excellence (on par with U.S. News' criteria) along with Hispanic enrolment, cultural programs, Hispanic support programs and percentage of Hispanic faculty.

Last, but certainly not least, is the icing on the cake of Stanford's college rankings. In its guide "The Best 361 Colleges," The Princeton Review found that Stanford has the fifth-highest "Overall Happiest Students." Last year, the University students ranked as happiest. It just goes to show that all the political maneuvering in the world can't buy this kind of weather.