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Data Collection Begins for 2012 Best Colleges Rankings
Tweet Share on Facebook March 31, 2011 Comment (4)U.S. News is hard at work on the next edition of the Best Colleges rankings.
We recently started collecting the statistical data that will be used for the 2012 edition of our college rankings, which will be published later this year. Data collection for the three U.S. News statistical surveys—main, financial aid, and finance—began on March 30.
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Are College Rankers Becoming Too Powerful?
Tweet Share on Facebook March 24, 2011 CommentAre universities overly influenced by the rankings? Are the ranking organizations themselves becoming too powerful, and are the rankers the ones really setting higher education policy? To what degree are students and others influenced by the rankings—and what are the long-term implications of the rapidly spreading global rankings movement?
In the soon to be published book, Rankings and the Reshaping of Higher Education: The Battle For World-Class Excellence, author Ellen Hazelkorn from Ireland's Dublin Institute of Technology attempts to answer these questions for academics and the general public.
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U.S. News Republishes 2011 Edition Engineering Specialty Rankings
Tweet Share on Facebook March 18, 2011 CommentAs a result of several database errors, we have taken down the most recent edition of some of the specialty rankings of engineering schools and reverted to our ranking of last year. While the changes are not significant, there are some discrepancies between the originally published data and the revised rankings currently at usnews.com. Those will now be the standard for this year. Unfortunately, we were unable to make changes in the printed version of Best Graduate Schools, which is now on newsstands.
Because year-to-year changes in these rankings are usually marginal, we don't feel that the outcome is substantial to our readers. However, we know that a one- or two-place change can be important to the institutions involved, and we apologize for any problems or confusion this has caused.
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ABA May Revise Law School Job Reporting
Tweet Share on Facebook March 17, 2011 CommentThe American Bar Association's Subcommittee on Consumer Information has issued a proposal, "Revised Standard Regarding Employment Data," on how law schools should report employment and salary data for new graduates. The proposed new reporting standards can be seen here. The proposal calls for law schools to calculate their nine-month after graduation rates based on the entire graduating class—something that U.S. News is now doing in our Best Law Schools rankings.
The new standards would also require law schools to report many different employment rates based on disaggregated data that would separate out full-time and part-time jobs where bar passage is required and a J.D. is preferred; other professional and non-professional jobs; and whether the job is law-school funded. This would be in sharp contrast to the one aggregated employment rate for both full and part-time legal and non-legal jobs that is currently used. It would also require schools to report salary data by many job types, which would be more detailed than the one overall salary figure for private and public sector jobs that is currently available.
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U.S. News Urges Law School Deans to Improve Employment Data
Tweet Share on Facebook March 9, 2011 Comment (24)The release of the new 2012 Best Law Schools rankings is scheduled for March 15, 2011. In an effort to make our law school employment data more reflective of the current state of legal employment, U.S. News has modified how we calculate the employment rates that are used in the new law school rankings. We will also be publishing more detailed law school employment data on our website as part of the new rankings.
U.S. News agrees with the efforts of Law School Transparency to improve employment information from law schools and make the data more widely available. We are also aware that the American Bar Association is studying changes to the standards that law schools must use when they report employment data for graduates. We agree that more still needs to be done by all parties. To that end, U.S. News Editor Brian Kelly reached out to law school deans in a letter mailed earlier this week. Below is the full text of the letter:
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'Crazy U' Takes on the College Rankings
Tweet Share on Facebook March 3, 2011 CommentAndrew Ferguson's new book, Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College, is a critique of the college admissions process and includes a very large section on the evolution and growing impact of the U.S. News Best Colleges rankings. Ferguson, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard magazine, writes about his firsthand experience with the world of college admissions through the lens of a parent and a skeptical journalist who asked tough questions as part of his quest to get his son into college.
He takes on private guidance counselors, essay writing guides, SAT/ACT prep, College Confidential, college tours, college rankings, financial aid, and obsessive parents. Ferguson also discusses how getting into college has become a big business and what that means to prospective students and their parents.
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