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Updates on 2 Graduate Schools' Ranking Data
Tweet Share on Facebook March 15, 2012 Comment (2)Officials at two schools to date have told U.S. News that they made errors reporting some of their data that was used in the newly published, 2013 edition of the Best Graduate Schools rankings.
Law: University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis advised U.S. News that it overreported the number and proportion of its 2010 graduates who had jobs at graduation.
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Making Sense of Law Schools' Jobs Data
Tweet Share on Facebook March 13, 2012 Comment (2)Now that new Best Law Schools rankings have been published, we want to give some perspective on the law school jobs data used in the latest rankings and what to expect in the future.
Anybody who is considering law school these days (and is wondering whether the investment would actually pay off in a job) may have noticed that there's been a lot of heated commentary over the last year about the usefulness of the employment data publicized by law schools, and much of it has been covered in this blog.
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U.S. News to Collect More Data From Colleges
Tweet Share on Facebook March 1, 2012 Comment (7)Later in March, U.S. News will begin collecting the statistical data that will be used for the 2013 edition of our Best Colleges rankings, which will be published later this year. We plan to collect and hope to publish information in three new areas: differential graduation rates based on income and race; data about the affordability of colleges; and information about each college's connectivity.
At U.S. News, we often hear feedback that we ought to collect and publish more information about how colleges and universities are serving their entire student populations. The Higher Education Opportunity Act, passed in 2009, requires that schools disclose the graduation rates of students who received a federal Pell grant, students who received a subsidized Stafford loan but not a Pell grant, and students who received neither.
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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 (1)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.
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Claremont McKenna Misrepresents Test Score Data
Tweet Share on Facebook January 31, 2012 Comment (4)Claremont McKenna College announced yesterday that it had falsely inflated its SAT scores of incoming freshmen that it annually reported to U.S. News from 2005 through 2011. These scores are used in the annual Best Colleges rankings and have a weight of 7.5 percent. The school also misreported the same SAT data to the U.S. Department of Education; its regional accrediting body, Western Association of Schools and Colleges; and many other publishers, such as College Board and Peterson’s.
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Students: Rankings Aren't Main Reason in College Choice
Tweet Share on Facebook January 26, 2012 Comment (3)Once again, a large scale social research study has contradicted the belief by many in higher education that the U.S. News Best Colleges rankings are the primary factor in the average student's choice of college. That conclusion comes from UCLA's just-released "The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2011," a highly regarded annual survey. This year's data is based on the responses of 203,967 entering first-year students at 270 U.S. four-year colleges and universities.
The UCLA survey asks new students to rate which factors were "very important" in influencing their decision to attend a particular college. Incoming fall 2011 freshmen could choose as many of the 22 reasons listed as they wanted. For the second year in a row, the college rankings finished in 11th place. At least, based on this large nationwide sample of freshmen from all types of colleges, students are consulting the rankings, but not as the most powerful force in their college search process.
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Key Stats About Ranked Online Education Degree Programs
Tweet Share on Facebook January 19, 2012 Comment (5)Last week's blog post emphasized the paucity of online master's in business degree programs that reported tracking their students after graduation (25 percent). Not mentioned was that all other online graduate disciplines surveyed had rates equal or even lower, except for nursing at 56 percent. But even respondents to the nursing survey provided limited specifics on post-graduate outcomes.
[Learn more about the Top Online Programs rankings.]
