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A Visit With Northwestern's Law School Dean
Tweet Share on Facebook July 24, 2007 Comment (2)
David E. Van Zandt, dean of Northwestern University's law school, visited me recently to discuss the law school rankings. Van Zandt is among a small minority of law school deans who think the law school rankings provide useful consumer information to prospective students. He says it's time to stop arguing against the rankings because they aren't going away.
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The Great Law School Rankings Debate
Tweet Share on Facebook July 20, 2007 Comment (4)The U.S. News law school rankings draw more attention and controversy than any of our other graduate school rankings. They've even been the subject of academic symposia. Two examples are the Association of American Law Schools "Workshop on the Ratings Game" and the Indiana University School of Law's "The Next Generation of Law School Rankings".
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Changes in the Law School Questionnaire
Tweet Share on Facebook July 16, 2007 Comment (1)The American Bar Association has taken new steps to reduce gamesmanship by law schools in reporting their job-placement data. In the upcoming edition of America's Best Graduate Schools, U.S. News will change the way it computes the percentage of law school graduates employed at graduation (and nine months after) as result of changes made by the ABA in its questionnaire.
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The Grad School Rankings Are Underway
Tweet Share on Facebook July 9, 2007 CommentU.S. News & World Report already has started work on the upcoming edition of America's Best Graduate Schools rankings that are to be published at the end of March 2008.
What's new this time? For the next edition, our plan is to do new peer assessment-only rankings in occupational therapy, pharmacy, physical therapy, social work, audiology, speech-language pathology, computer science, mathematics, physics, public affairs, public policy and public administration, clinical psychology, and the fine arts.
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Some Support from Reporters
Tweet Share on Facebook July 3, 2007 CommentA couple of journalists are making the case for the U.S. News rankings, explaining why the actions of a group of college presidents who have signed the letter boycotting the U.S. News peer survey may not be in the best interests of prospective students and their parents.
Robert Samuelson, a prizewinning journalist who works for Newsweek, does that in his Washington Post column "A College Course in Cynicism." Samuelson points out that the competition in college admissions isn't really that widespread because only a small group of schools are highly selective. He says the fact that the United States is a "status conscious society" and getting into "elite schools is a trophy" is the true cause of the college admissions frenzy. The U.S. News rankings aren't perfect, Samuelson writes, but they "expose users to masses of objective, comparative information: SAT scores; acceptance rates; graduation rates; student-faculty ratios." His sharpest point comes when he says that these college presidents are practicing "soft censorship" by not participating in the U.S. News rankings:
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College Rankings Go Global
Tweet Share on Facebook June 27, 2007 Comment (1)College rankings have expanded internationally over the past decade and are currently being published in many countries besides the United States, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Russia, Greece, Canada, Australia, China, and Australia. One clear explanation of this trend comes from the Institute for Higher Education Policy, which recently published "College and University Rankings: Global Perspectives and American Challenges."
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Podcast: Editor and Critic Debate Rankings
Tweet Share on Facebook June 25, 2007 CommentU.S. News' editor Brian Kelly discussed the college rankings with critic Lloyd Thacker during an interview for Inside Higher Ed on Friday.
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About the Annapolis Group's Statement
Tweet Share on Facebook June 22, 2007 CommentThe U.S. News America's Best Colleges rankings have been in the news a great deal this week. On June 19, an organization of independent liberal arts colleges called the Annapolis Group released a statement about some of its members' positions on participating in the peer assessment survey we use in the rankings. The statement says the majority of the college presidents attending the group's annual meeting "expressed their intent not to participate in the annual US News and World Report ranking exercise. The Annapolis Group is not a legislative body and any decision about participating in the US News rankings rests with the individual institutions." It also says the members agreed to offer their schools' data to the public in an alternative, common format: "The Web-based initiative, to be developed in collaboration with other higher education organizations, will provide easily accessible, comprehensive, and quantifiable data. The Annapolis Group members will work with the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) and the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC), among others to develop this common instrument."
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Meeting with LSU-Baton Rouge
Tweet Share on Facebook June 19, 2007 Comment (1)
On Tuesday, I met with Michael Ruffner, a spokesman for Louisiana State University-Baton Rouge, which is ranked in the Third Tier of National Universities in the 2007 edition of the America's Best Colleges. Ruffner and I discussed his belief that that some public universities don't fare as well in the rankings because they are Land Grant Colleges or Sea Grant Colleges, which means that they have to be more open in their admission policies since that is their mission. This makes it harder for them to compete against private schools that can be more selective. -
The Center Weighs In on Graduation Rates and Expenditures
Tweet Share on Facebook June 13, 2007 CommentOn Monday, Samuel Flanigan (deputy director of data research) and I met with the leaders of the Center for Measuring University Performance. The center, located, at Arizona State University, focuses on competition among major research universities and has its own widely read rankings. But its rankings are mainly based on research expenditures—not quite the total picture that prospective students and parents need to know. We met with John V. Lombardi— who is the University of Massachusetts-Amherst chancellor—and Elizabeth D. Capaldi—executive vice president and university provost of Arizona State University.
