Entries for April 2009

Our recently published 2010 America's Best Graduate Schools rankings have triggered a growing debate about how to rate grad schools and what factors should be used.

It's not a surprise that the new law school rankings have been the focus of such conversations, given the nature of legal education and the large number of law blogs. We welcome these discussions. Check out the blogs Above the Law and TaxProf for some of the best coverage and reactions to the law school rankings. Paul Caron, editor of the TaxProf blog, has published some interesting alternative rankings using data from our latest law school rankings. In addition, Prof. Brian Leiter's Law School Reports continue to offer sophisticated commentary and criticism as well as suggestions on how to improve the rankings. Leiter also does his own law rankings.

The new America's Best Graduate Schools 2010 edition has been published, and the rankings are now live on our website. The site has the most complete version of the rankings, tables, and lists and also has extensive profiles of more than 1,200 schools. In addition, the redesigned and improved website has wide-ranging interactivity and search features to help students find the graduate school that best fits their needs.

Some of these exclusive new rankings will also be published in the May 2009 issue of U.S.News & World Report and a newsstand guidebook, both of which will go on sale beginning April 28.

Notable highlights for America's Best Graduate Schools 2010 edition include the following:

I attended Wake Forest University's Rethinking Admissions conference, and it proved to be a highly worthwhile event. The conference has its own blog, which gives a detailed play-by-play take on what happened.

The last session revolved around the pros and cons of college rankings. There was agreement on the point that rankings are here to stay because they are part of the American culture and that prospective students and their parents do need the ability to compare colleges. But there was disagreement on how much harm these rankings do to the admissions process and applicants. There was also a discussion about the need to develop Web tools so students and parents could choose weights and variables to produce their own college rankings based on their particular preferences. U.S. News is studying the idea of developing such a personalized ranking tool, which would be an additional feature to the regular rankings on our America's Best Colleges website.

Why have the U.S. News "America's Best Colleges" rankings become a prominent part of the American higher education landscape? Kevin Carey, policy director for Education Sector, an independent think tank in Washington, tries to answer that question in his commentary called "College Rankings Will Never Die," which appeared in the Brainstorm blog in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Carey's thesis is that the process of choosing the right college is becoming an ever more complex decision given the amount of information that high school students and their parents need to digest. Colleges themselves have not established easy-to-understand measures of academic quality, so the creators of college rankings have successfully filled this information gap for consumers.

Are the U.S. News "America's Best Colleges" rankings a competition between colleges? What are the most and least important variables for schools to improve in order to rise in the rankings? In "The University Rankings Game: Modeling the Competition Among Universities for Ranking," recently published in the American Statistician , Rajdeep Grewal and Gary L. Lilien of Penn State and James A. Dearden of Lehigh University analyzed the U.S. News college rankings to try to answer those questions for top college administrators. Their article is part of a rapidly growing body of literature on college rankings and the impact a university's strategy will have on its rank.