Entries for July 2007

David E. Van Zandt, dean of Northwestern University's law school, visited me recently to discuss the law school rankings. Van Zandt is among a small minority of law school deans who think the law school rankings provide useful consumer information to prospective students. He says it's time to stop arguing against the rankings because they aren't going away.

The U.S. News law school rankings draw more attention and controversy than any of our other graduate school rankings. They've even been the subject of academic symposia. Two examples are the Association of American Law Schools "Workshop on the Ratings Game" and the Indiana University School of Law's "The Next Generation of Law School Rankings".

The American Bar Association has taken new steps to reduce gamesmanship by law schools in reporting their job-placement data. In the upcoming edition of America's Best Graduate Schools, U.S. News will change the way it computes the percentage of law school graduates employed at graduation (and nine months after) as result of changes made by the ABA in its questionnaire.

U.S. News & World Report already has started work on the upcoming edition of America's Best Graduate Schools rankings that are to be published at the end of March 2008.

What's new this time? For the next edition, our plan is to do new peer assessment-only rankings in occupational therapy, pharmacy, physical therapy, social work, audiology, speech-language pathology, computer science, mathematics, physics, public affairs, public policy and public administration, clinical psychology, and the fine arts.

A couple of journalists are making the case for the U.S. News rankings, explaining why the actions of a group of college presidents who have signed  the letter boycotting the U.S. News peer survey may not be in the best interests of prospective students and their parents.

Robert Samuelson, a prizewinning journalist who works for Newsweek, does that in his Washington Post column "A College Course in Cynicism." Samuelson points out that the competition in college admissions isn't really that widespread because only a small group of schools are highly selective. He says the fact that the United States is a "status conscious society" and getting into "elite schools is a trophy" is the true cause of the college admissions frenzy. The U.S. News rankings aren't perfect, Samuelson writes, but they "expose users to masses of objective, comparative information: SAT scores; acceptance rates; graduation rates; student-faculty ratios." His sharpest point comes when he says that these college presidents are practicing "soft censorship" by not participating in the U.S. News rankings: