Entries for May 2009

College rankings have become a global phenomenon since U.S . News first published our America's Best Colleges rankings in 1983 and are perhaps becoming a positive force for innovation at some colleges. There are now more than 40 countries with national rankings systems, and there are also a few international ranking systems that compare colleges across the world, including our World's Best Colleges and Universities.

Of course, it's clear that rankings are controversial, and many in academia in the United States and around the world have many issues with these systems. Some even believe that rankings do far more harm than good in terms of influencing higher education policy.

However, a recent report, "Impact of College Rankings on Institutional Decision Making: Four Country Case Studies," concludes that rankings have had a positive and innovative impact and that U.S. institutions should study those results. The report was published by the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP) in Washington and was based on interviews with key institutional stakeholders in Australia, Canada, Germany, and Japan.

I spoke at a very interesting conference, Assessing University Performance, on college rankings and measuring university performance this week in Washington. The gathering was cosponsored by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity and the American Enterprise Institute, and a complete audio record has been posted on AEI's website.

The speakers covered three main areas:

1. Assessing University Performance: The Role of Rankings
2. Are College Rankings Harmful or Helpful?
3. New Approaches to Assessing University Performance.

Since the launch of our 2010 Best Law Schools rankings, the law school blogosphere has been buzzing about the fact that Brooklyn Law School apparently did not report admissions data for its part-time J.D. program. U.S. News wants to comment on what happened and discuss how we'll handle such situations in future rankings.

According to our data-entry records, in late October 2008, when Brooklyn Law first worked on its U.S. News law school statistical survey, it entered complete full-time, part-time, and combined full-time and part-time law admissions data (LSAT, undergraduate grade-point average, and applications and acceptances) for all students in the 2008 entering class.

However, in early December 2008—when Brooklyn submitted its final data to U.S. News —the school had deleted the part-time admissions data and instead copied the full-time LSAT, full-time undergraduate grade-point average, and full-time applications and acceptances into the fields labeled "All Students." It should also be noted that this was the first year that U.S. News asked law schools to report admissions data for all students (full, part-time, and combined).

A few schools have told us that they made errors reporting some of their data that were used in the newly published America's Best Graduate Schools 2010 rankings. U.S. News is not going to recalculate the rankings because of these mistakes, but we are soon going to correct the data on our website.

Two law schools made errors in how they reported the information used to calculate the percentage of their 2007 graduating class that was employed nine months after graduation, which affected the new law school rankings. Both of these law schools would have ranked higher if these data had been used in the rankings. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln's corrected rate of 2007 law graduates employed nine months after graduation is 96.2 percent. The correct rate for the University of Hawaii (Richardson) is 100 percent.