(FORTUNE Magazine) – Another year is beginning on campus, so we turn to a question that has long engaged the minds and hearts of the best and brightest in academe: Which American college has the prettiest girls? Our preliminary answer, subject to revision if some real data ever become available, is Harvard. We slid into this exercise on something of a tangent. We were power-lunching the other day with Ernest van den Haag, formerly John M. Olin Professor of Jurisprudence and Public Policy at Fordham law school and now distinguished scholar at the Heritage Foundation. Ernest showed up with a manuscript he had just produced. Grabby title: ''Does Democracy Make Girls Prettier?'' The answer: You bet. ''When I lived in fascist Italy,'' he writes, ''I found the girls rather unattractive. When I returned after Mussolini had been hanged and democracy reintroduced, the girls seemed beautiful.'' He denies that his revised judgment reflects a preference for free elections, and your undistinguished servant inclines to agree with him. Girls are prettier in free countries. In 1963 we spent some time shuttling between East and West Berlin and could not help noticing the pulchritudinal superiority of the West. Outside of James Bond movies, beautiful Soviet women were always rare. How come? Part of the answer, van den Haag asserts plausibly, is that sex appeal was always rated politically incorrect in totalitarian societies, which characteristically discourage all efforts at self-expression. A larger part of the answer is that the higher income standards associated with free economies make attractiveness possible for more women. Good dentistry and good skin care are more available to people with money. So is good nutritional advice: In Europe and the U.S., studies have consistently shown strong negative correlations between socioeconomic status and obesity. Another reason for higher S.A. ratings among wealthy women is that good lookers do well at marrying high-status men. Many different scholarly papers support this assertion, but the one on our desk is ''Benefits of Being Attractive: Differential Payoffs for Men and Women,'' written by sociologists J. Richard Udry and Bruce K. Eckland of the University of North Carolina. The authors had undertaken a fascinating inquiry. More than 1,300 men and women in their 40s were rated on physical attractiveness. The ratings, based on high school photographs of each individual, were reflected in scores of 1 (least attractive) to 5 (most attractive) for each. These scores were then correlated with income and other measures of social status. Among the women, prettiness was strongly correlated with income -- not the earned income of the women who were employed but the household income of the women as a whole. ''Here the relationship is clear and nearly linear,'' state the authors. ''The more attractive the female, the higher the household income . . . We take this as evidence that females' attractiveness affects adult status through marriage to husbands of high income.'' While anything is possible in an individual case, one would expect the daughters produced by such marriages to be both brainier and prettier than average. Udry and Eckland note data demonstrating that, in general, ''highly attractive females come from families in which the father has more education, higher job status, and high income.'' Young women meeting this description are, of course, good bets to get superior educations. Arthur Jensen, professor of educational psychology at the University of California at Berkeley -- he is best known as a heavyweight participant in debates about IQ -- observed to us recently that he had often noticed this phenomenon. In many years of lecturing around the country, Jensen said, it had become obvious to him that the prettiest girls were at the most elite colleges. We take it that everyone accepts Harvard to be the most elite college there is. Harvard-Radcliffe accepts more National Merit scholars than any other college (close to 300 in an average year), has the biggest endowment (over $5 billion), and has research libraries recently containing over 12 million books (vs. around eight million for runner-up Berkeley). There has to be a lot of pulchritude to go with those numbers.