Rankings drop may mean little for GSE

The competition's strength and the 'U.S. News' methodology were cited as causes for the 10-spot drop. Although several of the University's graduate schools dropped in the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings that went on sale Monday, the Graduate School of Education took the most significant hit. Falling a dramatic 10 places over the year from a national ranking of 10th to 20th, the Education School has seen similarly drastic fluctuations in its ranking throughout the past several years. In 1995, the school was ranked 10th, but fell notably to 18th in 1997, the next year for which rankings were published. In 1998, the Education School soared back up to 10th only to fall again this year to 20th in the nation. U.S. News says such fluctuations are indicative not of changes in a school's quality but of its position relative to the other schools in the survey. "Movement in the rankings is not necessarily due to changes in the individual schools themselves but are rather relative to the pool of schools we're assessing them [against]," U.S. News publicist Emily Adcock said. Tom Kecskemethy, an assistant to Education School Dean Susan Fuhrman, said the rankings are arbitrary and stressed his confidence that the academic quality of the school's programs have in fact improved this year. "There's not much of a question in my mind that the quality of the school has done nothing but gone up," Kecskemethy said. He attributed the fall in rank to U.S. News' practice of rating different schools with a variety of goals, missions and standards. "U.S. News has favored larger schools over smaller schools like ours," Kecskemethy said. "All the schools ranked above us are [larger] schools of education." He noted that the drop in the rankings was not due to the school's quality but rather the means by which the magazine evaluates different schools. "I think that it is the methodology and subtle changes that brought us down in the rankings," Kecskemethy said, also referring to the large fluctuation of the Education School's rankings over the past few years. And U.S. News' Adcock even agreed that Penn's lower rankings do not "automatically conclude that the quality at a school has deteriorated." To rank graduate programs in the five major areas -- business, medicine, law, education and engineering -- U.S. News uses its own weighted average of 14 measures of academic standards plus two sets of reputation rankings which comprise 40 percent of the total ranking. In one, deans and faculty members are asked to rate the schools. In the other, superintendents from large school districts are asked to identify the best schools of education based on their experience in hiring graduate students. Kecskemethy noted that the superintendent reputation ranking -- which was a low 41 -- "hurt us the most this year." Officials at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education -- which is currently ranked in first place -- noted the importance of the reputation criteria but added that the rankings are indeed arbitrary. "We did well in the reputation rankings and that counts pretty highly," said Joel Monell, dean for administration and academic services at Harvard. "But I don't think any rating like that is entirely accurate -- I think it's just an approximation." Monell said that Harvard had "no major internal changes that would explain jumping from No. 3 to No. 1." Despite Kecskemethy's confidence that the Education School is doing all it should, he affirmed that the U.S. News rankings do matter to the schools itself and to prospective students. "It is a stated objective that our schools will have top-10 rankings," he said. "It's a little bit upsetting that we would drop. "The other audience it matters to is our prospective student body? for that reason too, we're going to be looking at the indicators that U.S. News employs and see what we can do to make some improvements."

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