<p>What would be your ranking of the top five (or top ten) grad schools overall. This includes breadth, program rankings, desirability (ie location), and prestige, and maybe personal bias/preference.</p>
<p>Ranking for top "overall" grad schools:
1. Berkeley
2. Stanford
3. Harvard
4. MIT
5. Princeton</p>
<p>They way I came up with this is to rank them by the number of grad programs ranked in the top 10. After these 5 schools, the ranking becomes pretty blurry.</p>
<p>^ do you have a complete listing of school ranking based on # of departments in Top 10? I'm curious to see how cornell,penn,columbia, cmu and usc place in that ranking. Thanks!</p>
<p>One may also want to evaluate the impact each graduate school has had on academia as a whole (or in each field, and then combine that). If that were factored in Berkeley would likely be ranked slightly lower, and the University of Chicago would move up somewhat significantly (especially in the social sciences) (Among other shifts).</p>
<p>How would Berkeley rank lower?....it was recently ranked the number one IT school in the country two years ago and discovered the nuclear bomb, the process of photosynthesis and has elements named after it. The only field I've heard alot about UChicago is in economics...Berkeley is prominent in all fields.</p>
<p>How the **** is Caltech not on that list anonamous provided the link to? I had presumed this school brilliant, on par or even better than MIT. What are the mechanics behind these rankings? I think they might be more biased than previously imagined.</p>
<p>Maybe because Caltech doesn't have economics, english, history, political science, psychology, sociology among other things</p>
<p>Why would anyone want to see the collective rankings of grad schools? You can't matriculate in each department at once, and strength in, say EE has diddlysquat to do with strength in sociology.</p>
<p>Worse, to "rank them by the number of grad programs ranked in the top 10" biases the ranking toward unusually large universities that have large numbers of departments. The least one could do is normalize for the number of grad departments.</p>
<p>Then let's take the ridiculous tables in the link in post 4. Does anyone doubt that the data was selected to make Berkeley look good. Note the following: These are not USNWR tables. Berkeley did them. Why these departments were selected is not stated. The only score used was "reputation". Finally, note that Berkeley chose to add "engineering" to the second table. It appears this was done only to lower Harvard's rank. To top it off, the numbers don't even agree with USNWR current online edition.</p>
<p>Methinks some posters here need a bit of education in the use and misuse of data.</p>
<p>Why is Medicine not listed in the second table? I guess because it would up Harvard's ranking.</p>
<p>newmassdad,</p>
<p>It says right at the top:</p>
<p>U.S. News & World Report’s
Ph.D. Program Ranking, 2008 Edition
Total Rank (based on Mean Reputation Score) for Institutions with 9 or More Programs</p>
<p>It states that these rankings only apply to institutions with 9 or more programs and that these are based on the USNWR's rankings.</p>
<p>Methinks you need to look at little more closely next time.</p>
<p>KUNRD07,</p>
<p>O clueless one, thank you for pointing out the obvious and totally ignoring what I asked in my post. </p>
<p>What does your post have to do with the VALIDITY of the so-called ranking? Maybe you think "9 or more programs" is some sort of magic cut-off?</p>
<p>And why are the numbers in the table in the link in disagreement with the numbers on the USNWR website?</p>
<p>Really now, you need to become an educated consumer, lest you fall for more junk like this. FWIW, just because a University puts out some garbage, it does not mean it is valid. You need to consider the source. This interesting piece of "research" came from the Communications & Events Office of the Berkeley grad school. In other words, the office has a PR function. </p>
<p>educated folks really need to know how to tell PR pieces from true research pieces.</p>
<p>Solfa, why are you arguing with me? You're the one who wanted to know our personal feelings on the matter. Suffice it say I believe it would be wise to factor in a schools impact as well as it's rankings.<br>
I didn't say that Berkeley would be ranked lower than Chicago. I was only saying it would not be number one. I say U-Chicago has had a large impact because it has either helped train, or held the 3rd most Nobel laureates (of American Universities, 4th internationally).
Nobel</a> laureates by university affiliation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Berkeley has less, but that does not mean I think it should necessarily be ranked lower than U-Chicago (I just think that it would not be number one if this was factored in as Harvard has produced more Nobel laureates, considering that UCB is tied with Harvard). I wasn't trying to degrade the accomplishments of Berkeley. Simply because you've only heard about U-Chicago's prestigious economics department does not mean it hasn't accomplished in other areas (although it is fair to say it has accomplished the most in the social sciences,)</p>
<p>Newmassdad, this is not the first instance of you belittling other forum members of their "education" (examples noted) and quite frankly, it is tiresome. Not just from this thread, but I remember you from the LAC name recognition discussion doing the same exact thing. Stop being so argumentative over everything. If someone wants to know top overall grad schools, then by all means either contribute to their request or stay out of it.</p>
<p>"Methinks some posters here need a bit of education in the use and misuse of data."
"Really now, you need to become an educated consumer"
"educated folks really need to know how to tell PR pieces from true research pieces."</p>
<p>masata_ace,</p>
<p>Glad you notice the theme. Have you ever thought that asking for the "best" or making requests for rankings of things that don't deserve ranking may not be the most intelligent thing to ask?</p>
<p>Maybe you felt personally belittled? For that I apologize. Maybe with some experience you will learn to not take things so personally.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, instead of bashing the messenger, how about contributing in a positive way to the discussion? </p>
<p>What do YOU think of the Berkeley data, for example? Think it is a quality piece? Think it could be improved?</p>
<p>Why do overall grad school rankings even matter? With graduate school, employers and academia will look at the department of the field being studied. Only a small amount, if anything, will be based on the overall credentials of a university's entire graduate school.
As newmassdad stated, Berkeley's data is purely for PR. Nobody choosing a graduate program should be influenced by that table.</p>
<p>I initially hesitated to post on this thread because I saw the question as completely meaningless. I assumed others would as well, and the question would pass unanswered.</p>
<p>At this point, I am compelled to echo Student35 and ask:
What earthly good would it do for ANYONE to rank universities in this manner?</p>
<p>The UCB data shows about the same results as the broader NRC data that is now pretty old. So it's fine for getting a quick overall picture of relatively strong grad schools and by that overall strong research universities.</p>
<p>One could argue that a university having a strong overall graduate program might indicate a university that has some characteristics that individual rankings cannot display (like administration's willingness to aid graduate students, provide unmeasurable forms of support, and other non-measurable factors). However, how well such a broad ranking could measure such specific things isn't entirely clear. It is more likely that it serves no purpose other than to possibly provide for an interesting discussion (partially relating to a university's overall prestige).</p>
<p>For the most objective ranking of top graduate schools, check the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index by Academic Analytics.</p>
<p>Rankings of individual top performance PhD programs by area of study may be also found here.</p>