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US News Grad Rankings Are Out

The US News released its 2008 Grad School Rankings today. I'm going to list the top ten for business school, law school, and medical school and provide links to the ranking methodology for each category. For other graduate specialties, please visit the US News site.

Business School Rankings and methodology 
1. Harvard
1. Stanford
3. Wharton
4.  MIT Sloan
4. Northwestern Kellogg
4. Univ. of Chicago
7. Dartmouth Tuck
7. UC Berkeley Haas
9. Columbia
10. NYU Stern

Law School Rankings
1. Yale
2. Harvard
2. Stanford
4. Columbia
5. NYU
6. UC Berkeley
7. Univ. of Chicago
7. Penn
9. Northwestern
9. Univ. of Michigan
9. Univ. of Virginia

( I am not including a link to the law school methodology because as I am writing the link provided is a bad link.)

Medical School Rankings (Research)  and Methodology
1. Harvard
2. Johns Hopkins
3. Washington U (St. Louis)
4. Penn
5. UCSF
6. Duke
6. Univ. of Washington
8. Stanford
9. UCLA
9. Yale

A few caveats: My strong recommendation is to use the rankings as a library of raw data  conveniently compiled in one location and not as a tried and true guide of educational quality. They are not the latter. They are the former. To the extent you are going to use the rankings as a guide to school reputation and brand value, you must understand the methodology behind them and what they are measuring. Be cognizant of the differences between what is important to you and what is important to the rankings.

A few observations on the rankings themselves:

  1. There are many ties in the rankings, which implies that the differences in reputation are almost imperceptible when talking about closely ranked programs. For example the difference between being "in the top ten" and out of the the top ten (i.e. #11) for MBA programs is 1 point,  for the top law schools is 2 points, and for the top medical schools is 1 point. Don't get hung up on these differences.
  2. The "top ten" changes little from year to year. In most cases, if you compare these rankings to the 2007 version, it looks as if US News just reshuffled the deck a little.

For more on rankings, please see:

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Posted on Friday, March 28, 2008 at 08:00AM by Registered CommenterLinda Abraham in , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | CommentsPost a Comment | References5 References

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