Entries for February 2009

It seems there is a growing interest among all sectors of academia in discussing the U.S. News rankings. One such discussion took place today at the College of Art Association's 2009 Annual Conference in Los Angeles. This was the first time that U .S. News gave a presentation on our graduate fine arts program rankings. The session was called "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of National Ranking of Art Programs."

The panel included Paul Lee, professor in the School of Art at the University of Tennessee; Joseph Seipel, senior associate dean for academic affairs and director of graduate studies at Virginia Commonwealth University; Bill Barrett, executive director of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design; and Patricia Olynyk, director of the Graduate School of Art at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

U.S. News editors regularly appear at conferences to discuss our rankings and to gather information on ways to improve them. On February 11, I gave a short presentation at a meeting of the National Organization of Bar Counsel (NOBC) in Boston. The presentation was titled "U.S. News Best Law School rankings: Are law schools offering adequate preparation? The role of the law school rankings."

NOBC's members are legal professionals whose members enforce the ethics rules that regulate the professional conduct of lawyers who practice law in the United States, Canada, and Australia.

One purpose of the presentation was to explore a very preliminary idea about whether professionalism and ethics should or could be added to the U.S. News law school rankings. There are a number of very key questions that need to be studied and answered in consultation with experts in this field before U.S. News would consider such an addition to our law school ranking methodology.

The new Webometrics Ranking of World Universities was just published by the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, the largest public research body in Spain. These rankings, published since 2004, look at 16,000 higher education institutions worldwide and measure the impact of a university's Web presence globally compared to other universities.

Editors from U.S. News met earlier this week with a cross section of high school counselors to get their input on various education issues. We found this meeting highly beneficial and heard many new ideas that we are studying.

The high school counselors who attended were Silvette Bullard from Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, D.C.; Marjorie Jacobs from SAR Academy in Riverdale, N.Y.; Annalee Nissenholtz, an independent college counselor in St. Louis; Susan Rexford from West Springfield High School in Springfield, Va.; and Missy Sanchez from Woodward Academy near Atlanta.

Do the U.S. News & World Report Law School rankings punish and discipline law schools? Yes, according the article "The Discipline of Rankings: Tight Coupling and Organizational Change" in the February 2009 American Sociological Review by professors Michael Sauder of the University of Iowa and Wendy Nelson Espeland of Northwestern University.

The authors say, "Using a case study of law schools, we explain why rankings have permeated law schools so extensively and why these organizations have been unable to buffer these institutional pressures." Sauder and Espeland argue that examining educational rankings in the context of disciplinary power provides an explanation for the effect that the U.S. News & World Report rankings have on law schools. The result, they assert, is a situation perfectly suited for generating anxiety, uncertainty, meticulous monitoring, and discipline.