<p>I have seen a lot of people talking about top ten lists of grad schools like they were a late night talk show. I find the whole idea of ranking graduate programs to be a bit...ummm....silly, given the highly specialized, highly personalized nature of the experience. Nonetheless, I would like to know what people feel contribute to these positions in rankings.</p>
<p>Is it number of faculty members in the department? Dollars via training grants? Dollars via research funding? Resources? Prestige of affiliated programs (eg. law school on campus)? Number of publications? Quality of publications? Admission rates into graduate programs? Number of postdocs?</p>
<p>What do people think would be good criteria to establish realistic tier levels of departments?</p>
<p>Seems like everything is important. But I would be happy if there is a study / ranking system that includes:
average grant$ per faculty, average impact factor and number of publications, and fraction of PhD graduates who are tenure-track professors.</p>
<p>i tend to think rankings are relatively meaningless. for example, harvard’s ranked 8th for latin american history and they have one person who studies latin america. seems a little silly.</p>
<p>Some ranking methodologies are based on surveys. In other words, how do the academics from one institution look at students coming from another. Although that may seem odd, it is actually fairly useful. If university A is viewed as the best university but university B is actually better, the person from university A will still get the job because it is recognized as a higher level institution by the hiring company. In that sense, the ranking systems may play a role in a student’s decision process. Consider the Harvard example StrangeLight posted. Even if Harvard doesn’t produce the most research, a student coming from Harvard may still be viewed more highly than a student coming from a more prolific program. So the rankings can be useful to determine how hiring companies will view your resume after you graduate, even if they don’t precisely say which school will give you the best education.</p>
<p>The rankings capture one big difference between the schools: how many notable researchers and teachers the school has in the field.</p>
<p>At a lower-tier school you will still find world-class experts, but mainly in minor or obscure areas of research. Bear in mind that if you are interested in that minor or obscure sub-field, then it is the best school for you! For example, a lower-level school in nuclear engineering might be investigating reactor cooling distribution networks - importnant but not cutting edge (I think - I’m not NucE).</p>
<p>At a mid-level school, the professors are contributing in more relevent areas, have more funding to do it, and a nominally better caliber of assistants (i.e. RA’s). Again, these schools may well be the best place for you if they match your field of interest! The nuclear engineering department here might be studying more efficient reactors, and modern safety systems,</p>
<p>At a top-tier school, the professors are generally involved in cutting-edge research, because they have the funding, support, and authority to make it happen. MIT’s NucE department has its own Tokomak fusion reactor!</p>
<p>If you are hiring either a professor or a researcher, these are valid issues! Of course, great researchers can and do come out of lesser-known schools, and if you need THE expert in XYZ it does not matter where he/she graduated - just that they are the expert.</p>
<p>I think any rankings of graduate programs - and indeed of schools in general - should be taken with a grain of salt, due precisely to what belevitt has mentioned: grad school is a highly customized and unique experience for each student. The thesis advisor is vastly more important in grad school than the program.</p>
<p>That being said, the rankings do provide a good (albeit rough) general sense of the average quality of the research being done by the faculty in individual programs. Obviously you will always find people who deviate from the average. You will find some superstar professors at lower-ranked institutions and some mediocre professors at higher-ranked institutions. But overall, on average, the rankings are pretty good. They are only good in a rough sense, though; while a school ranked #2 may seem to look significantly better than a school ranked #9, say, in reality the difference may not be nearly as large as the rankings would seem to indicate.</p>
<p>So I’d say rankings are good for providing a rough initial idea of which programs to look into, but one should never make final decisions based on the rankings.</p>
<p>If this question was directed towards me- I have some great answers. Firstly, there aren’t any faculty at the University of Colorado studying bacterial host pathogen interactions (at least in a context that I find interesting). Secondly, I don’t like the structure of the course requirements and lack of TAing possibilities at my local state university. Thirdly, I am put off by the Health Science Center aspect (as opposed to the more vibrant, traditional university model) of my local university. Fourthly, Denver is a relatively expensive place to live, certainly on a grad stipend. I can keep going with these but I think you get the point- my decision not to attend my local state university has nothing to do with how high or low it ranks but with how good of a fit it would be.</p>
<p>the schools themselves seem to hold rank in high regard, if you look at who is teaching at top schools, it is people from other top schools. this gets critical when your aim is to be an academic, i’d say.</p>
<p>and when people are referenced in print as students of those professors. </p>
<p>but I hear the rankings that get to the public are sometimes quite dated, for grad schools.</p>
<p>however, in many areas, as you have noted, it is a very personal and even eccentric sub-field that they will be working in. so the larger ranking is more irrelevant. In some areas, and even those sub-areas, the top 4 are, and have always been the top 4 and that is known and recognized, thus weighs in ‘the rankings’. sigh.</p>
<p>Every ranking has some merits but nothing is perfect.
I generally ask the PIs working in the field to name.
Then I also take into considerations things like how many professors have certain grants, and have published in the journals I am looking to publish in, etc.</p>