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Law School Rankings Too Powerful, Writers Say
Tweet Share on Facebook February 23, 2012 Comment (8)Well-known writers have made the case recently that the U.S. News Best Law Schools rankings are among the most powerful forces driving behavior at law schools.
In the online commentary piece titled "The Bad News Law Schools," Stanley Fish, a professor at Florida International University College of Law, reviews Failing Law Schools by Brian Tamanaha, a law professor and author. The book—to be published later in 2012—documents, in Tamanaha's view, what is wrong with law schools and calls out the "bad actors," which he says are the American Bar Association and the U.S. News rankings because they have driven law schools to be what they are today.
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Best Graduate Schools Rankings Launch March 13
Tweet Share on Facebook February 15, 2012 Comment (6)The new graduate school rankings are less than a month away.
Our new Best Graduate Schools rankings will be published online on March 13, 2012 on usnews.com. Highlights of the rankings will be published in the Best Graduate Schools 2013 edition newsstand guidebook, on sale April 3, 2012. The most comprehensive version of the upcoming Best Graduate Schools, including all the extended rankings and the most comprehensive data, will be available online only through the U.S. News Graduate School Compass.
As in the past, we will have new rankings in the five largest professional graduate school disciplines: business, law, education, engineering, and medicine, as well as the various specialties associated with each of those five broad disciplines.
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Rise in Endowments May Impact Best Colleges Rankings
Tweet Share on Facebook February 9, 2012 Comment (3)The value of college endowments, which had fallen very sharply during the recession, is now rapidly recovering along with the stock market. This finding comes from the newly released 2011 NACUBO-Commonfund Study of Endowments, produced by the National Association of College and University Business Officers.
It turns out that 2011 was another exceedingly good year for the performance of college endowments. According to the NACUBO study, the endowments of the 823 institutions that were surveyed had an average increase of 19.2 percent in the year ending June 30, 2011. This represents a significant improvement from last year's average gain of 11.9 percent and the 18.7 percent decline reported in endowments for the recession-plagued 2009.
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Seeking Input on Online Degree Rankings
Tweet Share on Facebook February 2, 2012 Comment (2)Following the inaugural release of the Top Online Education Programs rankings, U.S. News reached out to the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET) to answer questions from their members and to establish an ongoing dialogue with the organization. This was done to initiate a process that potentially will improve the degree program rankings and program-level data collection in future years.
WCET—an organization that works to advance and evaluate the most effective uses of technology in higher education—had authored a review of the new rankings in January. The review presented critiques that bear resemblance to many cited elsewhere in specialized media that cover online education. U.S. News believes these critiques often rest on faulty assumptions about the rankings methodologies.
