How U.S. News Calculated the 2012 Graduate School Rankings

Each year, U.S. News ranks professional-school programs in business, education, engineering, law, and medicine. These rankings are based on two types of data: expert opinions about program excellence and statistical indicators that measure the quality of a school's faculty, research, and students. The data come from surveys of administrators at more than 1,200 programs and some 13,000 academics and professionals, conducted during the fall of 2010 and early 2011. 

As you research course offerings and weigh schools' intangible attributes, the information on usnews.com can help you make comparisons of concrete factors such as student-to-faculty ratio and placement success upon graduation. It's important that you use the rankings to supplement—not substitute for—careful thought and your own inquiries. 

In addition to the five professional disciplines ranked annually, we also periodically rank programs in the sciences, social sciences and humanities, the health arena, and many other areas based solely on the ratings of academic experts. This year, new surveys were conducted and new rankings produced for healthcare management, nursing, nursing-anesthesia, nursing-midwifery, physician assistant, public health, rehabilitation counseling, and veterinary medicine. Rankings of other health fields; the Ph.D. programs in the humanities and social sciences and the sciences; and master's programs in public affairs and public policy, fine arts, and library and information studies are based on earlier surveys and are republished. The date of the ranking appears at the top of each list. 

To gather the peer assessment data, we asked deans, program directors, and senior faculty to judge the academic quality of programs in their field on a scale of 1 (marginal) to 5 (outstanding). In business, education, engineering, law, and medicine, we also surveyed professionals who hire new graduates. The two most recent years' ratings from professionals were averaged to compute those assessment scores. Statistical indicators used in these disciplines fall into two categories: inputs, or measures of the qualities that students and faculty bring to the educational experience, and outputs, measures of graduates' achievements linked to their degrees. Different output measures are available for different fields. In business, for example, we used starting salaries after graduation and the ability of graduates to find jobs upon graduation or three months later. In law, we looked at employment rates and state bar exam passage rates among first-time test-takers.

In fields of business, education, engineering, law, and medicine we have numerically ranked the top three-fourths of the schools. The bottom one-quarter of the schools are listed as Rank Not Published and are listed alphabetically (see below for full explanation of Rank Not Published). The schools in business, education, engineering, law, and medicine that did not provide U.S. News with enough information to be ranked are listed as Unranked (see below for full explanation of Unranked).

This year, we modified how we compute the employment rates used in the law school rankings. In the past, new J.D.s counted as employed at graduation and at nine months out if they were working full or part time in a legal or non-legal job or pursuing additional graduate education; so did 25 percent of those whose status was "unknown." Now, the rates are figured solely based on the number of grads working full or part time in a legal or non-legal job divided by the total number of J.D. graduates. Also, those who are not seeking employment are now counted in the calculation as part of the total number of graduates; previously, they were excluded.

In response to interest from both readers and institutions in knowing where more law schools sit, we have extended the list of numerically ranked institutions from the top 100 to the top three-quarters of the schools. The remaining schools are listed alphabetically as the second tier. In addition, we are publishing our first ranking of law schools by hiring partners and recruiters who work at law firms that were part of the 2010 Best Law Firms rankings produced by U.S. News and the publication Best Lawyers.