Our New Grad School Rankings Are Online

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:

The law school rankings got an upgrade. We published our first-ever ranking of part-time J.D. law programs. This new ranking evaluated the part-time law programs at 87 law schools that are accredited by the American Bar Association. We defined a part-time J.D. program as a law school that has a separate admissions process for part-time law students and has at least 20 part-time students enrolled.

As we have annually since 1990, we published updated law school rankings, which cover all law schools. We also have new rankings in clinical training, dispute resolution, environmental law, healthcare law, intellectual property law, international law, legal writing, tax law, and trial advocacy.

Also new in the 2010 edition are updated peer-assessment-only rankings for Ph.D. programs in the social sciences and humanities and their specialties in the fields of English, history, psychology, sociology, political science, economics, and criminology. In addition, we published new rankings for master's degree programs in library and information studies and specialties.

As we have in the past, we will have new rankings in four other large graduate school disciplines and their specialties:

• Business
• Engineering

We are also republishing peer-assessment-only rankings from previous years in these graduate areas:

• The Sciences
• Health Fields
• Public Affairs
• Fine Arts

It has come to our attention, since the law rankings were published, that a few schools might have submitted incorrect data to U.S. News. We are studying these situations very carefully and will have more to say next week.