Who's No. 1? Academy Hopes New Rankings Will Say More

摘要

The United States may be a consumer-oriented society. But when it comes to graduate education, the consumers―students―are consistently left in the dark. Instead of having access to hard data such as attrition rates, levels of financial aid, and the fates of their predecessors, most prospective graduate students in the sciences are forced to ferret out meager bits of information before making a decision that could shape the rest of their lives. But help may be on the way from an unlikely source. Next summer the National Research Council (NRC), the working arm of the august National Academies, hopes to launch a more user-friendly version of its assessment of U.S. research doctorate programs. The controversial but popular exercise, first done in 1982 and repeated in 1995, is best known for its rankings of departments based on their reputations. The rankings are used by university administrators to see how their programs stack up against the competition and what they must do to move up. But NRC officials hope that the third edition will also help give prospective students the information they need to select a program that is right for them. The lack of such a guide has left the door open to commercial ventures, notably the weekly magazine U.S. News and World Report, to publish annual rankings of the "best" graduate schools in the country.