Grad schools stay near top in 'U.S. News' rankings

U.S. News and World Report recently released their annual rankings of America's best graduate schools, with five of the University's 12 graduate schools ranked in this year's installment.

Penn's graduate schools placed in the top 10 in four out of the five categories ranked this year. The Wharton School was ranked third, just behind Harvard and Stanford. The School of Medicine was ranked fourth in the category for research institutions, behind Harvard, Washington University in St. Louis and Johns Hopkins University. The School of Law was tied for seventh with the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and the Graduate School of Education was ranked ninth.

In addition, the School of Engineering and Applied Science tied for 26th with the University of Florida and the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

U.S. News only ranks these five categories annually. The other graduate schools are ranked less frequently.

While all of the schools are proud of their recorded accomplishments, many question the validity of ranking schools from year to year.

Following the recently published rankings, Wharton Dean Patrick Harker released an e-mail statement on Tuesday announcing that the Wharton graduate school will no longer participate in future rankings. Officials at the Harvard Business School made a similar announcement simultaneously.

"It is time to measure our institution's excellence, not from rankings, but by the achievements of every program and by the accomplishments of our students, faculty, staff and alumni," the statement said.

In order to enforce this new decision, Wharton will no longer distribute lists of student or alumni e-mail addresses for surveys from commercial enterprises in the future.

"Many in the academic community have questioned the methodologies employed in some rankings, as well as the fact that some publications change methodologies from year to year, leading to speculation that some rankings are driven more by editorial agendas than by objective data," Harker said. "We share these concerns, as do our Harvard Business School counterparts."

Michael Fitts, dean of the Law School, also echoed these sentiments.

"If you're going to have rankings, then it's nice to be ranked in the top group," Fitts said. "But I always take the rankings, as everyone else should, with a big grain of salt."

Penn Law School was also tied for seventh with Michigan last year and has been showing an upward trend over the past several years.

"We've hired a number of faculty over the last few years, and our admissions process has heightened considerably," Fitts said. "I think in many respects we are much better than seventh, but in the end what I think this confirms is that Penn is one of the top law schools in the country."

The Graduate School of Education experienced a small slip in rankings from last year when it was sixth.

"We're pretty sure that the method used to reach superintendents for their rankings has changed this year," GSE Dean Susan Fuhrman said. "We had a big change in one year, and we don't really know why, so we have to find out."

Another factor could be increases in research expenditures at other universities, such as eighth-ranked University of Oregon, which recently opened a multimillion-dollar research center, according to Fuhrman.

The rankings used by U.S. News to rate graduate schools are composed of expert opinions about program quality and statistical indicators that measure the quality of a school's faculty, research and students.

The highest-ranked school is given a score of 100, and then subsequent universities' scores are calculated as a percentage of that top score, which makes the overall performance of a school relative to the other schools with which it is being compared.

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