The way that students structure the colleges they choose among in a particular educational market is analyzed with a sample of 408 locally-college-bound high school seniors from 16 area schools. In January and February 1985, the College Image Questionnaire was administered to the seniors. The students judged the similarity (psychological distance) between nine pairs of colleges that preliminary research had identified as constituting 92% of the higher education choices of locally-college-bound students. An additional college designated as the "ideal" was incorporated into the students' choice set in order to operationalize the ideal point preference model. Students also evaluated the colleges on a set of 18 characteristics that influence college choice. Factor analysis was used to reduce the 18 variables to a subset of four factors identified as: academic standards and reputation, religious emphasis and paternalism, social opportunity, and expensive and inconvenient. An ALSCAL multidimensional scaling algorithm was applied to the data and the output was a spatial representation of the colleges that reflects the competitive images students hold of these colleges and their relationship to an ideal. Results of the analyses are discussed. (SW)