Morse Code: Inside the College Rankings

The New Grad Rankings Are on the Way

March 27, 2008 RSS Feed Print

It's getting very close to the launch of the next America's Best Graduate Schools rankings: The 2009 edition is going to be published on Friday, March 28, 2008, the day that the new rankings go live on our website. The online site has the most complete version of the rankings, tables, and lists and also has extensive profiles of each school. In addition, the website has wide-ranging interactivity and search features to help students and parents find the right graduate school that best fits their needs.

Some of these exclusive new rankings will also be published in the magazine's April 7-14 issue and a newsstand guidebook, both of which will go on sale beginning Monday, March 31.

Notable highlights for 2009 include the following:

• New rankings of health programs in audiology, clinical psychology, occupational therapy, pharmacy, physical therapy, social work, and speech-language pathology

• New rankings of master of public affairs and public policy and master of fine arts programs

• Updated rankings of Ph.D. programs in computer science, mathematics, and physics

You can see all the new rankings at these links on March 28:

America’s Best Graduate Schools 2009 edition main ranking index page
Business
Law
Medical
Engineering
Education
The Sciences
Library & Information Studies
Social Sciences & Humanities
Health
Public Affairs
Fine Arts

Tags:: graduate schools,; rankings

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Professor Brian Leiter's law school rankings focus on the academic prestige of publishing faculty that is important to fellow academics who focus on publishing. He recently suggested a series of changes to your methodology that would make USN&WR rankings much close to Professor Leiter's own approach. While his approach is fine for those who care mostly about pretigious publishing, and is therefore a useful niche ranking system for that small corner of academia, I urge you not to follow his suggested approach.
Bob Morse responds: We agree that our rankings need to remain unique and we will be careful if we make changes so they don't become like someone elses. We do find it worthwhile to read other views about what we do, but we are able to put them into proper perspective.

anon of 2:34PM April 01, 2008

Is it true that it is not the LSAT scores that are inputted, but , in fact, the percentile ranks for those scores? If so, which data are you using: The percentiles for the previous 4 administrations of the LSAT?
Also, if you are using percentiles for law, is it the same for all of the other rankings that use standardized tests? It seems if this were the case, there is a diminishing return for schools to attempt to raise their medians, especially at the high end, and a dispoportionate effect for schools with medians closer to the national average. Why is this fair?
Bob Morse responds: It's true that we use the percentiles. It's true at the high end there is diminishing returns. However, when you compare a score of 150 to a 170 i.e. one way is 150/170 = 88%. When you use percentile. it's closer to 50 percentile / 98 percentile which measure the real difference in the two scores. In other words, using percentile measure the real distance between the scores for comparison purposes. We use perecentiles in Best Colleges.

Evan of IL 12:44PM April 01, 2008

Mr. Morse,
when you consider the Student to Faculty Ratios (full-time doctoral students to full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty (.075) and full-time master's students to full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty (.0375) in the fall of 2007), is a higher student to faculty ratio more favorable or lower ratio more favorble to a school's ranking? That is not clear in your methdology.
Bob Morse responds: In engineering rankings a higher ratio is better. We are using a higher ratio as a measure of fac ulty productivity.

Jack Hu of MI 12:05AM April 01, 2008

The New Grad Rankings Are on the Way

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