Frequently Asked Questions–Rankings

1. Why does U.S. News rank graduate schools?
2. How do you rank schools?
3. Do you rank all schools in a graduate discipline?
4. How do you select the schools or programs you rank and which programs are ranked new this year?
5. Why does U.S. News rank certain disciplines and not others?
6. How do you rank specialties within various disciplines?
7. Are rankings from previous years still valid?
8. Why don't the ranking lists show all the rank numbers?
9. How do the U.S. News rankings compare with other graduate school rankings?
10. How does U.S. News get a peer assessment score?
11. What are "input" measures of academic quality?
12. What are "output" measures of academic quality?
13. What does it mean when schools are tied?
14. Where do the data on quality measures come from?
15. Why are there more rankings online than in print?

1. Why does U.S. News rank graduate schools?
The process of selecting among the various schools that offer graduate programs in your area of interest involves factors ranging from the personal to the objective. We want to help you with this process by giving you an independent assessment of the academic quality of programs in your field. By collecting data annually for the fields of business, education, engineering, law, and medicine, we are able to present the most current figures on enrollment, job placement, faculty, and other critical quality indicators that help you make informed decisions. In other graduate fields, we usually gather data on a program every three or four years, asking the experts who teach and direct programs in these fields to evaluate their peer programs.
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2. How do you rank schools?
There are two different ways that we rank graduate programs.

For the five graduate program areas with the largest enrollments-business, education, engineering, law, and medicine-we use a combination of statistical data and expert assessment data. The statistical data we collect include both input and output measures. Input measures reflect the quality of students, faculty, and other resources brought to the education process. Output measures signal an institution's success in managing that process so graduates achieve desired results, such as passing the bar exam or getting a high-paying job offer.
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The expert assessment data for these areas come from surveys of knowledgeable individuals in academia and practitioners in each profession. Survey respondents are asked to rate the programs with which they are familiar on a scale of "marginal" (1) to "outstanding" (5). Statistical and assessment data are standardized about their means, and standardized scores are weighted, totaled, and rescaled so that the top score is 100 and other scores are expressed as whole percentages of the top score. Schools are then ranked by their rescaled score.

We also rank a variety of programs—including Ph.D. programs in the sciences and humanities and programs in healthcare and the arts—solely on the basis of peer assessment data from academics involved in that particular field. For a more general explanation, please read "How U.S. News ranks graduate schools." For specific information about how we rank each discipline, review the methodologies for business, education, engineering, law, medicine, Ph.D.'s, the arts, health sciences, and public affairs.
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3. Do you rank all schools in a graduate discipline?
We survey all programs in a discipline that meet generally recognized criteria for a professional program in that field. In many fields—business, law, and the health professions—we survey only accredited programs. Since other programs generally do not have an accrediting body, when we construct surveys in these areas we use available resources, such as the most recent Survey of Earned Doctorates, and cooperate with organizations and schools to determine which schools are currently offering graduate programs in a field.

While we rank all schools for which we have data, we publish ranks of only the top schools in business, education, engineering, law, and medicine in our print edition of America's Best Graduate Schools. For law, we publish the top 100 and list the remaining schools in two tiers (the third and fourth). For business, education, engineering, and medicine, we publish the top 50 schools in print.

We have expanded the number of schools in business, education, engineering, and medicine for which we publish the rankings.

In those disciplines where we collect peer assessment data only, we publish in print the ranks of roughly one quarter of the schools we survey. In our premium online edition, we increase that number to include all schools that achieve a score of 2.5 or higher on a 5-point scale.

We rank 184 U.S. law schools, including all those that have fully approved American Bar Association accreditation status. Law schools from Puerto Rico and those that have provisional accreditation status are not ranked. In the fields of business, education, engineering, and medicine we publish lists of the top-ranked schools.

For schools of education, we present a table showing some important information about the teacher training and professional development programs at all the education schools that returned our survey. This table lists them alphabetically; it should not be confused with a ranking.
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4. How do you select the schools or programs you rank and which programs are newly ranked this year?
If an accrediting body exists for a discipline or professional preparation program, we use the list of accredited programs at the time our survey is constructed to define the population of schools or programs to be considered in our ranking. In a very few instances, schools or programs may be excluded, usually because of restricted access, because a program is too young to permit gathering of all the data needed to compute indicators based on multiyear data, or because a program is not fully accredited by the appropriate accrediting agency. Our list of law schools contains virtually all schools in the United States accredited by the American Bar Association. We consult the American Medical Association and the American Osteopathic Association for lists of accredited medical schools, and AACSB International, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, for accredited master's programs in business located in the United States. For the fields of engineering and education, we use the Survey of Earned Doctorates and other resources to develop our lists of schools. The list of engineering schools is similar but not necessarily identical to the list of engineering schools having programs accredited by ABET, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology.

The following list contains the total number of schools or programs that we surveyed in each discipline:

Audiology - 102; Biological Sciences - 249; Business - 425; Chemistry - 194; Clinical Psychology - 210; Computer Science - 151; Criminology - 32; Earth Sciences - 105; Economics - 132; Education - 278; Engineering - 198; English - 148; Fine Arts- 220; Healthcare Management - 68; History - 142; Law - 195; Library Science - 50; Mathematics - 167; Medical Schools - 145; Nursing - 395; Nurse Anesthesia - 102; Nurse-Midwifery - 35; Occupational Therapy - 152; Pharmacy - 101; Physical Therapy - 199; Physician Assistant - 104; Physics - 165; Political Science - 117; Psychology - 370; Public Affairs - 269; Public Health - 36; Rehabilitation Counseling - 98; Social Work - 177; Sociology - 115; Speech-Language Pathology - 247; Veterinary Medicine - 28

The following are the programs, in addition to all the rankings in business, education, engineering, law, and medicine, which are newly ranked in the America's Best Graduate School's 2009 Edition: Audiology; Clinical Psychology; Computer Science; Fine Arts; Mathematics; Occupational Therapy; Pharmacy; Physical Therapy; Physics; Public Affairs; Social Work and Speech-Language Pathology

The rankings in all the other programs have been republished from previous years.
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5. Why does U.S. News rank certain disciplines and not others?
Because we cannot survey every area of study, we make our decisions on the disciplines to rank on the basis of how to best serve the greatest number of readers. We look at enrollment figures to determine the most popular areas of study. The disciplines we survey every year are the areas of law, business, medicine, engineering, and education. In these areas we collect peer assessment data as well as objective data on entering students, faculty, finances, and job placement that we use to calculate quality indicators.

We survey graduate programs in other areas on a rotating cycle, collecting peer assessment data. In areas where rankings are not computed annually, we publish the date of ranking with each list. These areas include doctoral programs in the physical and social sciences and the humanities, as well as master's programs in public affairs and a number of programs in the health sciences.

The specialty areas in a discipline that we rank are selected on the basis of trends as well as enrollment. In some instances, we may rotate certain specialties to provide a more comprehensive coverage of a field. Specialty rankings are determined by the number of nominations for excellence in that area a program receives. Only respondents to the peer assessment survey in the discipline are asked to nominate programs for excellence in any specialty.

If a discipline is not ranked by U.S. News, it is not because the editors think it is unimportant. The primary determinants for selecting disciplines to rank are size of enrollment and the number of schools offering that degree program.
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6. How do you rank specialties within various disciplines?
For each discipline, we identify the subjects in which schools most often offer concentrations. These areas are usually the most popular choices of specialization among graduate students. In some instances an area of specialization may not have large enrollment but may be of particular or emerging importance in the field. We ask the respondents to the peer assessment survey in a field—graduate school deans, program directors, and/or senior faculty—to nominate schools that have outstanding programs in each specialty area. Each survey respondent may nominate up to 10 schools in any specialty area. Since a directory of law faculty is available, we survey law faculty members who are listed as teaching in the specific specialty area we rank. Law faculty are asked to nominate up to 15 outstanding programs in the specialty they teach. We publish the schools receiving the highest number of nominations in each specialty area. Specialty rankings are based solely on the number of nominations they receive in each specialty area. The number of schools we publish in any specialty area varies, depending on the statistical significance of our survey results.

This year for engineering specialties, we worked in conjunction with the American Society for Engineering Education to obtain a list of department heads in each of the specialty areas. The department heads were given a list of the schools that offered doctoral programs in their particular specialty and asked to rate them on a scale from "marginal" (1) to "outstanding" (5). The responses for each school were then averaged by the number of responses for that school.
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7. Are rankings from previous years still valid?
Rankings from previous years contain valid information but are not necessarily comparable with rankings based on data collected and analyzed this year. For the disciplines of business, education, engineering, law, and medicine, where we do extensive statistical data gathering, we constantly strive to improve our data-processing procedures to spot errors. We review our statistical surveys each year to sharpen our questions so that our indicators yield results as closely comparable as possible over all schools. There may also be trends and situations, such as the economic climate, that differ and have an impact on the data points we collect. If you are going to compare a school from year to year, we recommend that you compare the data, not necessarily the ranking of the school. This year's rankings use the data that best reflect current conditions.
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8. Why don't the ranking lists show all the rank numbers?
Among the five most popular areas of graduate and professional study—business, education, engineering, law, and medicine—U.S. News publishes numbered rankings of the top schools. A school's rank tells you how many schools garner a higher score on the U.S. News ranking model. Schools that have the same score are listed alphabetically.

For example, suppose that a single school scores higher than all others on the U.S. News ranking model. It then has Rank 1. Now suppose that three schools are tied with the second-highest score. Each of those three schools will have Rank 2. Then the next-highest-scoring school will have Rank 5. The fifth-ranked school achieves a third-highest score, but because of the three-way tie among schools achieving the second-highest score, there are four schools that rank higher, so the third-highest-scoring school has Rank 5, not Rank 3. In this example, no school has a rank of 3 or 4.

For rankings of specialties within these areas and programs outside of them, we have used the visual device of printing the rank of tied schools only once, to emphasize that the schools are tied on our ranking lists.
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9. How do the U.S. News rankings compare with other graduate school rankings?
First, there aren't a lot of graduate school rankings.

The National Research Council (NRC) last released rankings of graduate programs in September 1995. The NRC has been collecting data at 10-year intervals and is currently evaluating various methodologies for its next study. Also under consideration is the question of whether the NRC will publish rankings or adopt another format for presenting its evaluations.

Researchers Evan Rogers and Sharon J. Rogers have compared rankings produced by the 1995 NRC study with those U.S. News has developed, looking specifically at the U.S. News rankings based on peer assessment data only. They concluded that there was "a very high positive association between U.S. News peer assessment scores and rankings and those reported by the NRC." Their article in the May 1997 issue of the American Association of Higher Education Bulletin further discusses this topic.

Some other organizations compile business school rankings. Our ranking methodology differs, giving different results. If you choose to consult other rankings, we encourage you to study the methodology to understand the differences between the U.S. News rankings and those of other organizations.
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10. How does U.S. News get a peer assessment score?
One way of getting at the quality of a graduate program is to survey the people in the best position to have an informed opinion-academics who administer and teach in these programs and people who hire or work directly with graduates of these programs.

For all disciplines we rank, we surveyed deans or program directors as well as department chairs or faculty members, asking them to rate the quality of each program in their field on a scale from "marginal" (1) to "outstanding" (5). If the respondent was unfamiliar with any program, s/he had the option of indicating "don't know."

A second survey was sent out to practitioners in the fields of business, education, engineering, law, and medicine. These people—recruiters of recent graduates from business or engineering schools, school superintendents, professionals in legal fields, including law firm hiring partners, judges and state attorneys general, and directors of medical residency programs—were surveyed using the same survey format (a five-point Likert scale) used with academics.
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11. What are "input" measures of academic quality?
Input measures of academic quality reflect the relative performance of factors brought to the graduate education process. These factors include the academic preparation of the entering class, faculty-student ratio, and research funding.
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12. What are "output" measures of academic quality?
Output measures of academic quality are measures we use to gauge how well an institution succeeds in its mission of preparing its graduates for professional life. These measures include job placement rates, starting salaries for M.B.A. program graduates, and bar passage rates for law graduates.
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13. What does it mean when schools are tied?
Schools that achieve the same score on our ranking model are published with the same rank. This means that, taking into account all the factors considered in the ranking model, tied schools are comparable overall. However, tied schools may vary in their performance on certain individual factors that go into determining overall rank. Look at the detail provided in our table to see how tied schools perform on individual factors, especially those of importance to you. For example, tied schools may show differences in research expenditures or student-faculty ratios.

Schools that are tied are listed in alphabetical order. For further details see Question 8, "Why don't the ranking lists show all the rank number?"
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14. Where do the data on quality measures come from?
Most of the information is reported to us directly by the schools. Each year, U.S. News sends an extensive questionnaire to each school for each of the disciplines of business, education, engineering, law, and medicine. When the surveys are returned, U.S. News analyzes the data for errors, large changes, or inconsistencies. Errors and anomalies are resolved in concert with the school, which then verifies data stored in our database.

Where possible, we cross-check data with other sources.
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15. Why are there more rankings online than in print?
When we publish our rankings in print, there are space limitations that prevent us from going as deeply as we are able. As we do not have those limitations online, we are able to extend the number of schools we rank online to the level that we think is appropriate.
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