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 nearly 15,000 academics and professionals, conducted during the fall of 2011 and early 2012.
As you research course offerings and weigh schools' intangible attributes, the information on this website can help you make comparisons of concrete factors such as faculty-student 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 occupational therapy, pharmacy, physical therapy, social work, audiology, speech-language pathology, clinical psychology, fine arts, and public affairs and public policy.
Rankings of other health fields (healthcare management, nursing, nursing-anesthesia, nursing-midwifery, physician assistant, public health, rehabilitation counseling, and veterinary medicine) and the Ph.D. programs in the humanities, social sciences, and the sciences are based on earlier surveys and are republished plus an existing ranking of programs in library and information studies; the date of each of those rankings appears at the top of the 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. As inputs, for example, we use acceptance rates and the appropriate admission test scores for each discipline: the LSAT, GMAT, MCAT, or GRE.
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.
This year, in computing the part-time M.B.A. rankings, we have for the first time included as ranking factors the percentage of a graduate business school's enrollment that is part time, the mean undergraduate GPA of entering part-time students, the mean GMAT of entering part-time students, and the average months of experience of entering part-time students, in addition to the peer assessment score.
How schools are scored: To arrive at a school's rank, we examined the data for each quality indicator. Where appropriate, we translated the indicators in which low values suggest higher quality, such as acceptance rates. We then standardized the value of each indicator about its mean.
The weights applied to the indicators reflect our judgment about their relative importance, as determined in consultation with experts in each field. The final scores were rescaled: The highest-scoring school was assigned 100, and the other schools' scores were recalculated as a percentage of that top score. The scores were then rounded to the nearest whole number and schools placed in descending order.
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