Finishing Up the New Grad School Rankings
We're currently working hard on number crunching, validity checks, and data analysis in order to be able to produce the upcoming 2010 edition of our America's Best Graduate Schools rankings. The statistical and peer assessment data collection for business, law, engineering, medicine, education and the rest of the programs that are being ranked began in late October 2008 and is now complete. The 2010 edition will be published in April 2009 online at usnews.com.
What's will be new this time? For the 2010 edition, we're doing new peer-assessment-only rankings for Ph.D. programs in English, history, psychology, sociology, political science, economics, and criminology and criminal justice. In addition, we will be publishing new rankings for master's degree programs in library and information studies.
We also plan to publish our first-ever ranking of part-time J.D. law programs. This new ranking will evaluate the approximately 87 American Bar Association fully accredited law schools that offer a part-time law program. U.S. News has defined a part-time J.D. program as a law school that has a separate admission process for part-time law students and specific part-time J.D. program curriculum offerings.
Of course, as we have since 1990, we'll publish our regular law school rankings, which will cover all law schools. We'll also have new rankings in clinical training, dispute resolution, environmental law, healthcare law, intellectual property law, international law, legal writing, tax law, and trial advocacy.
Besides law, we'll continue to publish updated rankings in four other large graduate school disciplines: business, education, engineering, and medicine (as well as the various specialties associated with those disciplines).
Tags: business school | graduate schools | law school | medical school | rankings | engineering graduate school | education graduate school | arts and sciences graduate programs
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Reader Comments
Typo
The first word in the second paragraph has a typo.
Medical School Rankings
It would be great if the rankings placed greater stress on where exactly the schools will get you for residency. In other words, residency reputation scores/peer assessment scores are far more useful than lump sum research money (which in US News apparently do not use proper NIH classifications and are inclusive of independent hospitals with teaching affiliations). Take HMS for example. There are so many hospitals (that are not university hospitals), but the ultimate reflection of quality of education is limited by the best hospital of the group, Mass General, which is clinically #5 in the country by US News and itself not the leading individual research hospital (though it is amongst independent hospitals). As you are not simultaneously experiencing the faculty of each of the three major medical centers all at once, the faculty:student ratio does not make much sense in this case. Again, proper NIH classification and greater emphasis on residency director reputation/peer assessment scores will reduce the bias of basing the research list purely on total research money rather than funding/quality per individual medical center.
Part-Time Backdoor
I know that usnews was aware of that practice and is now ranking accordingly. I don't know what procedure they are taking, or if it will be taken into account for the 2010 rankings. However, I do know that some local schools are changing their admissions policies because that loophole is closing.
It was a pretty shady practice schools were engaging in - trying to hide students by admitting them part-time for a semesster so they could make an extra buck without affecting their ranking.
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