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What greater wisdom do the U.S. News graduate-school rankings provide?
Berkeley's
disciplines — 11 this year — all finished in the top 10. The magazine
offers no blanket institutional ranking to inspire cries of "We're
No.1!" — but where there are data to crunch, there's always a way
By Jonathan King, Public Affairs
| 13 April 2006
The latest set of U.S. News & World Report
rankings, released on March 31, provide the grad-school bound with a
rough assessment of which universities might best serve their
intellectual needs. That is, after all, the traditional function of the
U.S. News & World Report rankings. Another tradition is
the twice-yearly opportunity they provide for energetic box-score
analyzing and methodological head-scratching on the part of academics
and their administrators.
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(Source: U.S. News & World Report; table prepared by UC Berkeley Office of Planning & Analysis)
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This
year's grad-school rankings were in five professional-school categories
(engineering, medicine, law, business, and education) and six academic
groupings (biological sciences, chemistry, computer science, earth
sciences, mathematics, and physics). A further breakdown of those
master categories into their major programs and specialties yielded
further rankings, and at least the promise of further nuance for those
analyzing the available data. But first, the overall rankings in those areas in which
Berkeley maintains a program (which is to say, everywhere but medicine
this year): business (7); law (8); engineering (3); education (6);
biological sciences (2); chemistry (1); computer science (1); earth
sciences (4); mathematics (2); and physics (4). So: Go Bears? It's notable that Berkeley places in the top 10 in all four professional-school disciplines. But because U.S.News
offers no overall ranking, bragging rights at this level reside
primarily within disciplines — though there are ways to extrapolate
from these atomic findings to a more global institutional message. Still, the nuance thing is not yet apparent. The rankings
of constituent programs and specialties within the 11 larger subject
areas yield a few more insights (see table at right) — but not all that
many: Few spectacular variances or glaring weak spots emerge even at
that level of detail. And while checking the ranking of one Berkeley
program against a rival's, or one's alma mater's, can be highly
gratifying (or, on occasion, irritating), as an individual data point
it means very little. That said, let's indulge a bit: Of six UC
campus ranked among the top 50 engineering schools, Berkeley, at No. 3,
outpaced San Diego (11), UCLA (15), Santa Barbara (21), Davis (35), and
Irvine (41). In biological sciences, Berkeley (tied for No. 2) not only
kept pace with Harvard and MIT but ranked higher than its own fraternal
campuses in San Francisco (9), San Diego (12), Davis, (17), Los
Angeles, (22), Irvine (32), and Santa Barbara. (40). You wanna piece of
chemistry? Berkeley (1, tied with MIT) trounced UCLA (12), Irvine and
San Diego (18), UCSF and Santa Barbara (31) . . . . Modesty
demands we stop. But as noted above, at a certain level gratification
can be reliably distilled from these tea leaves, even if wisdom can't. Complicating
any campus's attempt to see its true reflection in this much-consulted
mirror is a lack of clarity about the methodolog(ies) U.S. News
employs to produce its calculations … never mind its final rankings.
"Our rankings combine expert opinion and statistical indicators" reads
the large-type highlight from the magazine's very general front note on
the topic. What one learns from the brief text itself is that rankings
for the sciences, social sciences, and humanities "are based solely on
the ratings of academic experts," in contrast with the
professional-school assessments, which are based on "surveys of more
than 1,200 programs and some 9,600 academics and professionals…." Clearly, relying overmuch on the data from 1,200
self-reporting surveys could lead to, if not the outright skewing of
results, at least a sense that something less than total accuracy has
been achieved. That risk is compounded by the belief of many observers
that changes in U.S. News methodologies can lead to apparent
gains or drops in the rankings that have little if anything to do with
program quality. (Indeed, rankings aficionados can generally be counted
on to understate the accuracy of all U.S. News results, right
up to the point where — if they are university employees — they
acknowledge the utility of those results as a recruitment and
development talking point, and change the subject to recent trends in
the display of tabular data.) Those caveats established, there remain ways to look at the U.S. News
data that yield useful institutional results. The Graduate Division has
crunched the numbers available for crunching from this spring's
rankings, yielding a measurement of "total rank" by looking at ranked
institutions with nine or more measured academic (not professional)
programs and then taking the mean of the "reputation scores" used by
the magazine in both its methodological processes. By that metric,
Berkeley (2.4) comes out No. 1 in total rank, a tenth of a mean rating
ahead of Stanford (2.5). We are, in other words, by this standard
numero uno. On the other hand, in calculating total rank for
professional-school categories (business, education, engineering, and
law) the Grad Division number-crunchers found that Berkeley this year
drops to second place in total rank, with a mean rank of 5.0, far
behind Stanford (1.5). But then, no other university paced the Cardinal
either in this area: Clustered with Berkeley in the two-through-four
spots are Harvard (6.6) and Michigan (6.8), with the field weakening
markedly beyond that (fourth-placed Michigan, with a mean rank of 11,
had no professional school ranked higher than fifth). Will total
rank be cited henceforth by campus boosters in search of a memorable
metric to impart about our excellence? Not likely: It's hardly common
parlance, and is in any event a difficult metric to interpret,
particularly when the sample used to calculate it is large. It may be
useful, though — substantively so — as a measurement of campus
"excellence." This most elusive (yet most cherished) of all
institutional metrics is one a prospective grad student might well
prize if he or she were in a field that creatively interacts with many
others — or in a field, the student believes, that ought to. |
