<p>I will preface this by saying many fine liberal arts colleges are not on many grad ranking lists because they do not have grad programs. That aside,</p>
<p>1) Grad school rankings matter because their faculty members are among the best in their fields and their letters of recommendation can go a long way in your pursuits beyond grad school.</p>
<p>2) In the sciences and in some social science fields many of these faculty members have access to grant money which they often use to employ grads and undergrads in labs providing them with invaluable experience. This could jump start your opportunity and capacity for research.</p>
<p>3) In the humanities, many high ranking programs have undergraduate journals and departmental honors programs which provide opportunities for publishing and have writing samples based on original research that you can use for graduate applications.</p>
<p>4) Networking: In addition to letters of recommendation from high ranking faculty members you have access to networks of other experts in your fields. Many high ranking programs host expert scholars in their fields for up to a year or two at a time and thus you have access to working with scholars/scientists from other campuses where you might forge relationships that would aid you in applying to graduate school.</p>
<p>Those are just a few reasons. I will say this: You must be ASSERTIVE if your pursuits because often (on the downside) these folks are busy, but if you are persistent you can have endless opportunities.</p>
<p>Just some things to think about in making you decision.</p>
<p>I don’t think they’re very useful at all. Sure, they can be used as a reasonable starting point, but good old-fashioned research is by far the best way to select colleges. Graduate rankings are even more useless at the graduate level, ironically.</p>
<p>This post ignores that 60-70% of undergrads change their major at least once. An awesome political science program does you little good if you decide you’re really more interested in gender studies. </p>
<p>I’d much rather start with a book like Rugg’s Recommendations, personally. It combines well with the Fiske Guide.</p>
<p>^ I completely agree that graduate program rankings are only one useful starting point for inquiry, and then only for Ph.D.-granting institutions. And it’s true that a majority of undergrads change their major at least once, so it’s a mistake to “put all your eggs in one basket,” so to speak, and choose a school for its strength in a single department.</p>
<p>On the other hand, these rankings really can help you weed out some schools that may have strong reputations overall but may be weak in particular fields you are strongly interested in. They can also be helpful in pointing you in the direction of schools that have superior academic strength across-the-board. That’s really a very small number of schools, as it turns out; and perhaps surprisingly to some on CC, they’re not all Ivies or other top privates. </p>
<p>But I’d take all rankings and recommendations, including Ruggs and Fiske, with a huge grain of salt. At best these resources are the beginning of an inquiry, not the end. Cross-correlations among a variety of rankings and recommendations may be somewhat more reliable. But at the end of the day if you’re going to do this right, it takes some diligent inquiry. Use the rankings and recommendation to develop an initial list of possible schools in a field you may be interested in. See who’s on the faculty at each school, what do they teach, what are their credentials and academic bona fides? What’s NOT taught at school A that is taught at other schools reputed to be strong in the field? Are there gaps in the curriculum or in major research specialties within the field, and are there exceptional strengths in some areas? What’s the student-faculty ratio within the department, and what are class sizes like (since, after all, you may end up taking a third to half your classes within a single department)? Are there particular faculty members in the department whose work is especially interesting to you, and if so, do they teach and advise undergrads? How many classes in the department are taught by grad students, how many by adjuncts or visitors, and how many by tenured or tenure-track faculty? Where do students in the department end up; how many go on to earn Ph.D.s, and just as importantly, where (on the theory that a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford is not the same as a Ph.D. in physics from Florida State)? Make your own side-by-side comparisons of what appear to be the top schools in the field with the schools you realistically have a chance of attending, and see how your own reaches, matches, and safeties stack up against the cream of the crop. Then start talking to real people, especially students and faculty members at the schools you visit, and gather their observations and impressions and see how they stack up against your own research. Then do the same thing in several other fields of possible interest to you. It’s a ton of work and at the end of the day your research may be somewhat inconclusive, especially insofar as you’ll find there are weaknesses at every school. But you’ll learn a lot in the process about a number of academic disciplines, and about a number of schools. You’ll make a far better informed decision than the thousands of kids mindlessly chasing after US News rankings or other superficial indicia of “prestige.” And you’ll start college far better prepared to tackle your intended major—whether it ends up being what you stick with, or not.</p>
<p>To the extent your university utilizes graduate students as Teaching Assistants, to lead discussion sections and grade papers, it may be potentially helpful to you if your TA is not an idiot. Which may be more likely if that graduate department is highly ranked.</p>
That’s sidestepping the issue. Many posters here often use graduate rankings foolishly, either out of ignorance or in a vain attempt to prove superiority in undergraduate quality.</p>
<p>Here’s one such example:
</p>
<p>Besides, since what you say is true, why bother consulting graduate rankings at all? Students could just assume (usually accurately) that the top universities are strong in most fields. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>TAs at Berkeley were never used in lectures, professors taught all my courses…only discussion and lab sections for larger science, economics and math classes were taught by TAs.</p>
<p>And, if you think those smaller, LAC-like universities don’t use TAs, you’re kidding yourself:
<p>"Or why not find a university that doesn’t use TAs very often so you can be taught by the professors themselves? "</p>
<p>That is also an option. But be careful, you may get what you wish for. D1 had an experience at her LAC when she went to prof for help on a particular topic, then he deliberately put a question on the test on the precise point that he knew, through their help session, that she was bad at. If there had been a TA to go to instead, this would not have happened.</p>
<p>Usually where TAs are used it’s for recitation sections, extra help; not the lectures. So far as I know.</p>
<p>But I thought this thread was more whether, given a grad school, it’s better to have a high ranked one. Not whether it’s better not to have a grad school at all. That’s a valid discussion, but maybe for a separate thread. I though frequently where there’s a grad school there is the TAs; kind of a package deal of the genre. But maybe I’m mistaken.</p>
<p>You’re not mistaken; that’s absolutely right. TAs are typically grad students pursuing their Ph.D.s. In most fields, Ph.D. candidates are seeking that degree with the hope that they’ll land academic positions (though perhaps this is less true in engineering and some sciences than in the social sciences and humanities). But many colleges and universities won’t hire people into tenure-track faculty positions unless they have some prior teaching experience. That puts the graduate schools in the position of needing to give their grad students some kind of teaching experience so they can be competitive on the academic job market, and that means putting them in front of undergraduates. That’s why, back in the day when I was a grad student at a leading Ivy with a reputation for being strongly undergrad-oriented, every grad student in my department worked as a TA, doing exactly the same kind of work—leading “recitation” sessions, grading assignments and papers, etc—that they would have done at a Michigan or a Berkeley.</p>
<p>Now I won’t say it’s just the same everywhere. Some cash-strapped universities DO rely more heavily on TAs to do more of the undergrad teaching as lecturers in entry-level and sometimes even intermediate-level courses. In those schools undergrads do have less contact with actual faculty members. But generally the fault line isn’t public v. private or large school v. small school. It’s better-resourced schools v. more thinly-resourced schools. And by and large the top graduate programs are going to be at schools on the better-resourced side of that line, including a mix of top publics and top privates.</p>
<p>Grad rankings “sometimes” reflect the undergrad department. And when they don’t… you will feel dumb for choosing a school based off grad rankings.</p>
<p>Grad rankingfs ALWAYS reflect the faculty quality of programs. The only exception would be grad only departments like law and medicine. The vast majority of departments teach both levels. Also advanced undergrads can often take some grad level classes in their major. At most schools top profs teach one grad and one undergrad level class plus advise grad students and do research.</p>