Many factors go into ranking graduate school programs across the country. Credit: Amal Saeed | Photo Editor
Teacher-student ratio, job placement after graduation and course offerings are just a few of the factors that play a part in ranking graduate schools.
Graduate school rankings provide a guide for students to compare programs across the country and examine the factors that contribute to a school or program’s overall score.
The U.S. News & World Report education rankings annually rank high schools, colleges and graduate schools in a variety of categories. The U.S. News Best Grad Schools methodologies reflect “the current higher education landscape and what outside experts, such as deans, admissions experts, etc., view as indicators of academic quality,” Robert Morse, chief data strategist for U.S. News, said in an email.
“U.S. News recommends that students research course offerings and weigh schools’ intangible attributes, while using the information on the U.S. News website to compare concrete factors, such as student-faculty ratio and job placement success upon graduation,” Morse said.
Each year, U.S. News ranks programs in business, education, engineering, law, medicine and nursing, including specialties in each area, according to its website. The rankings are based on expert opinions about each program and statistical evidence on the quality of faculty, research and students.
The methodologies and data that go into creating college rankings differ for varying graduate degrees, Morse said.
“In business, U.S. News uses starting salaries and new MBAs’ ability to find jobs upon graduation or three months later,” Morse said. “In law, U.S. News looks at state bar exam passage rates and employment rates.”
Poets and Quants, a news resource for business education, ranks online and in-person Master of Business Administration programs, as well as entrepreneurship programs, by surveying participating programs and recent graduates to obtain their data for their ranking, Nathan Allen, an author for Poets and Quants, said.
“The survey is about 40 questions, and they range from anything that is asking about the career services department of the school to extracurricular activities that remain available, and we compile all that data and then crunch the numbers and publish the rankings,” Allen said.
The survey also looks at acceptance rates, GMAT — the entrance exam for business school — scores and years of work experience before entering the program, Allen said.
“Another thing we’re trying to measure is just seeing the value of the degree in the market. So one thing we’re increasingly trying to adopt is what alumni are doing immediately after their degree in terms of their professional work,” Allen said.
While rankings provide a comparative look into the overall quality of programs, a number of factors can influence students’ decisions beyond prestige.
“The important factor for me was having an in-state school because it gets really expensive to go out of state,” Alyssa Hopkins, an Ohio State alumna earning her Master of Science with a concentration in speech-language pathology at Bowling Green State University, said. “I also looked at prestige for the schools around me but not so much over the whole country because typically the more prestigious schools get really pricey.”
Though researched rankings like U.S. News and Poets and Quants are helpful, online forums and blogs from actual students offer a different perspective, Hopkins said.
“For researching schools, I used U.S. News, some Reddit blogs of students at the schools — which offered a unique perspective of the program from actual students — and GradCafe,” Hopkins said.
GradCafe is an online forum for graduate and potential graduate students to share information about their programs.
The U.S. News 2020 graduate ranking is available on its website and Poets and Quants’ 2020 MBA and entrepreneurship rankings will be available in October and November.
