Entries for March 2008

It's getting very close to the launch of the next America's Best Graduate Schools rankings: The 2009 edition is going to be published on Friday, March 28, 2008, the day that the new rankings go live on our website. The online site has the most complete version of the rankings, tables, and lists and also has extensive profiles of each school. In addition, the website has wide-ranging interactivity and search features to help students and parents find the right graduate school that best fits their needs.

Some of these exclusive new rankings will also be published in the magazine's April 7-14 issue and a newsstand guidebook, both of which will go on sale beginning Monday, March 31.

The American Bar Association's ABA Journal has just jumped into the fray with a long article titled "The Rankings Czar." I think the article is balanced and fair and examines many critical issues about the law school rankings. Of course, the article has also been discussed by many bloggers, including Concurring Opinions, TaxProf, and Law Librarian.

U.S. News & World Report already has begun work for the upcoming 2009 edition of America's Best Colleges rankings that are scheduled to be published in late August 2008. On March 21, 2008, we started the statistical data collection for information used to produce the America’s Best Colleges rankings, guidebook, and website. Surveys were sent to over 1,900 schools. This data collection is done online through a secure U.S. News website.

We work on the college rankings 12 months a year. We hold regular meetings with higher education experts in order to ask for suggestions as well as to understand the latest campus trends. These consultations with college presidents, deans, institutional researchers, and high school counselors give us an opportunity to gather feedback on our ranking methodology. These conferences are also an important source for story ideas.

We have recently mailed out the annual peer assessment surveys that will be used in the rankings. College presidents, provosts, and admission deans at around 1,420 colleges and universities should start receiving their surveys during the week of March 24. Respondents have roughly eight weeks to return the surveys; we send a second survey mailing after the first month to those who haven't yet responded.

There is another new explanation about why it's very difficult for engineering schools to change their rankings in the U.S. News America's Best Graduate Schools. The problem is that this new theory doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

The new hypothesis of why the U.S. News graduate engineering rankings don't change much comes from Adrian Bejan, a mechanical engineering professor at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering. He says there is an engineering explanation for this, and it's linked to "constructal theory," which he developed. Bejan's premise is that constructal theory" shows that the hierarchy of universities will stay quite rigid despite improvements at individual schools.

Distance education, increasingly known as E-learning and increasingly popular, has long been lacking ways to measure accountability. That might be changing, as several schools are participating in the effort to develop a voluntary student outcomes measurement system. The plan, "Transparency by Design: Principles of Good Practice for Higher Education Institutions Serving Adults at a Distance," began in September 2007 and aims to publish the first school-specific data in 2009.

According to Michael Offerman, vice chairman of Capella University (who has a blog called The Other 85 Percent), the time has come to start addressing the lack of accountability and outcomes measures among the online education community. Up to this point, there has been very little information available on how well students do at specific online universities.

"The Official Leaked US News Law School Rankings, Plus Ranking Secrets Revealed!" Not quite. That "secret" memo that appears to have originated on the Concurring Opinions blog doesn't reveal the new law school rankings, and the accompanying "secret" memo and comments are not those of any U.S. News employee. We're much funnier.

When are the real new law school rankings coming out? U.S.News & World Report's new law rankings will be published online on March 28, 2008 on our website (usnews.com) in the 2009 edition of America's Best Graduate Schools. We urge everyone interested in seeing the accurate rankings— and the methodology that was used— to come back to U.S. News the last Friday of this month.

In a recent article at Inside Higher Ed, Gerald Graff, a professor of English at the University of Illinois-Chicago and president of the Modern Language Association, questions why many in academia are so afraid of the outcomes assessment movement and why they think—incorrectly—that it means a lessening of their academic freedom.

Graff points out that many schools just want to admit the best students (he calls it the "Best Student Fetish") and don't seem that interested in determining whether they have learned anything at the university or not. He writes that: