<p>So I am a bit confused regarding the rankings I see. I will be attending graduate school. Which ranking would you say is more important to look at? USNews, NRC R, or NRC S? </p>
<p>Why the confusion? Different ranking use different methodologies. There is no definitive ranking. The rankings may not take your subfield or the professor you want to work with into account. I’d say the more important one is the one that ranks my school higher.</p>
<p>Personally, I put a bit more stock in the NRC rankings, since that’s a council of scholars who were trying to organize the academic quality of programs for the explicit purpose of comparing departments, while U.S. News is mostly trying to sell magazines. However, there’s a great deal of overlap between the rankings themselves anyway.</p>
<p>Here’s the U.S. News methodology: (from <a href=“http://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/articles/2013/03/11/methodology-best-social-sciences-and-humanities-schools-rankings”>http://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/articles/2013/03/11/methodology-best-social-sciences-and-humanities-schools-rankings</a>)</p>
<p>Rankings of doctoral programs in the social sciences and humanities are based solely on the results of peer assessment surveys sent to academics in each discipline. Each school offering a doctoral program was sent two surveys (with the exception of criminology, where each school received four). The individuals rated the quality of the program at each institution on a scale of 1 (marginal) to 5 (outstanding). Individuals who were unfamiliar with a particular school’s programs were asked to select “don’t know.”</p>
<p>They do the rankings in the sciences the same way. There’s a lot of variability in the response rates. For example, only 25% of the academic chemists they surveyed responded, while 67% of the academic statisticians did. Response rates in the social sciences and humanities were pretty low; except for criminology, they were all under 30%.</p>
<p>Knowing the methodology also helps you evaluate those rankings. For example, the only thing separating #1 ranked Stanford from #4 ranked Yale is 0.2 points. My #14-ranked psychology program (Columbia) is only 0.6 points lower than Stanford and 0.4 points lower than Yale. Are these meaningful differences? Who knows?</p>
<p>The NRC rankings give a statistical range instead of a single point estimate. The NRC has a [url=<a href=“http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12676]guide[/url”>A Guide to the Methodology of the National Research Council Assessment of Doctorate Programs | The National Academies Press]guide[/url</a>] to their methodology. The S and R rankings are kind of similar; the factors included in both are the same, but the difference between them is how weights were assigned to different factors. In the R-rankings, a regression analysis was used; a sample group of faculty were asked to rate programs in their area and the NRC used statistical analysis to compute the weights from the faculty ratings. In the S-rankings, faculty were asked explicitly about the importance of the factors, and weights were assigned based on the results. So the R-rankings are sort of an implicitly derived system of weights, while the S-rankings are more explicitly derived.</p>
<p>*The factors included in these computations included the number of publications per faculty member, citations per publication (except in computer science and the humanities), fraction of the faculty supported by grants and number of grants per faculty member, diversity of the faculty and students, student GRE scores, graduate student funding, number of Ph.D.s and completion percentage, time to degree, academic plans of graduating students, student work space, student health insurance, and student activities.<a href=“-from%20Wikipedia,%20which%20cites%20the%20methodology%20report”>/i</a>.</p>
<p>Personally I think this is far more comprehensive than the U.S. News’ kind of nebulous “please rate the overall quality of this program”, and so where applicable I prefer to use the NRC rankings as evaluators of quality. However, the interesting thing about it is that it kind of doesn’t matter, as the U.S. News’ rankings are remarkably similar. For example, my own psychology program is ranked #14 by U.S. News. It’s S-rank range is 6-26 (with the point estimate thus around 16) and the R-rank range is 10-36 (which would make the point estimate around 23, I think). <em>shrug</em></p>
<p>But the important thing to remember is rankings should only be a small part of your holistic decision about where to apply and where to attend. There are other ways to get a sense of the overall direction of a department’s reputation without looking at ranking lists, and a couple of places in the grand scheme of things don’t really make a big deal. Harvard’s program is technically ranked higher than my program, but I had zero desire to go there because there’s no one else doing the kinds of things I wanted to do there. The same is true of MIT on the U.S. News list.</p>