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).