<p>Others have said this, but there is absolutely no point to this sort of list beyond bragging rights. You go to grad school to focus intensively on one discipline. The quality of your school's Art History Ph. D program has exactly zero bearing on the quality of your medical school education.</p>
<p>It might give you someone more interesting to date. Grad students do date.</p>
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I don't have a lot of time, but in general, any Engineering ranking that includes Emory and UNC is questionable since neither one of those universities have Engineering departments.
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<p>Unlike other rankings, Academic Analytics does not rank individual universities per se, but rather individual PhD programs within universities. For classification purposes, each program is assigned to a "discipline" category. Different "disciplines" are then aggregated to a "broad field" at a higher level. </p>
<p>If I understand it correctly, Emory University offers a graduate program in biomedical engineering which is assigned to the category "biomedical engineering" (or something similar) at the lower level and then aggregated to the broader field "engineering" at the next level. Note then that, at the broader engineering level, the FSP index for Emory University is therefore taking into account academic productivity data from one PhD program only, whereas the index for MIT for example is actually based on data from multiple (EE, ME, ChemE, CivE, etc.) programs which have been all aggregated to the broader "engineering" field. I believe the same happens in the case of UNC, which offers a PhD program in "Material Sciences" that is also aggregated to the broad "engineering" field at the next level. </p>
<p>That particular feature of the FSP methodology makes comparisons at the broad field or university level tricky sometimes, although still valid. In any case, the FSP index is most useful anyway for comparisons at the lower level of specialty rankings by discipline, where I believe the index is pretty accurate. </p>
<p>Keep in mind though that, since FSP ranks individual programs as opposed to universities, one single university may have two or more different programs listed under the same area ranking. For example, CMU offers two separate PhD programs, respectively in "Computer Science" properly and in "Machine Learning and Statistics", which are both ranked separately under the same "Computer Science" discipline category.</p>
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Others have said this, but there is absolutely no point to this sort of list beyond bragging rights. You go to grad school to focus intensively on one discipline. The quality of your school's Art History Ph. D program has exactly zero bearing on the quality of your medical school education.
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<p>True. However in general it seems that schools with a strong grad program in one field have strong programs in all its other fields. This is probably because the schools with the best grad programs tend to be research powerhouses that invest heavily in its grad programs, sometimes at the sacrifice of its undergrad (like Berkeley for example).</p>
<p>Also I'd like to note that while rankings may seem elitist to some, they are important in academia and job placement. I have read on grad schools' websites that for some specialties, attending a top 12 graduate program is crucial for job security. This is especially true for PhDs in the humanities, where such degrees aren't as marketable outside academia. Academia itself is extremely competitive and many PhDs are never tenured. You have to be the "best of the best" and publish tons of research to land the best jobs.</p>