In Medical Sciences Public Affairs, though, puzzled staff started calling Washington, D.C., to see what had happened. Someone groaned at the School of Law. The engineering dean spoke pragmatically.
Welcome to the up-and-down world of U.S. News & World Report rankings.
In the first week of March, the magazine released its cover-story annual assessment of graduate programs in business, engineering, law and medicine--rankings it has produced controversially for seven years. To these, the company adds new disciplines every year, all of which are bundled into an annual guidebook that hits the stands later this month. More ratings, this time of undergraduate programs, are released each fall.
UC Davis, named by U.S. News several years ago as an "up and coming" university, fared well again this month. The agricultural engineering graduate program ranked fifth in the country. The campus's doctoral programs in biological sciences ranked 20th and the geology doctoral program ranked 25th. The Graduate School of Management surged from 59th a year ago to 39th.
Other programs, however, were ranked farther back than last year. The College of Engineering was listed as 44th, a drop from its listing of 37th last year, and the School of Law found itself 41st, a drop from its place as 30th last year. The School of Medicine's ranking slid from second in the country last year to 20th in the primary-care field.
Deans of professional programs that dropped back have suggested several possible reasons: California's tough job market for new attorneys, a decrease in medical graduates taking primary-care internships, constraints that make it difficult for the engineering program to change its ratio of doctoral students to faculty. But no one is exactly certain.
"The fact is that the quality of a program rarely changes dramatically in a single year," said Robert Grey, provost and executive vice chancellor at UC Davis. "Truly excellent programs are usually built by steady incremental improvements, and it often takes a while for reputation to catch up. UC Davis strives for excellence in all of its programs and it's gratifying to see our reputation grow accordingly."
Meteoric rises and concrete plummets are among the reasons U.S. News has been in hot water with universities, whose administrators and faculty question their methodology. Last fall, UCLA issued a succinct news release questioning the magazine survey's validity and reliability, stating also that the survey favors private universities over public ones. During the past year, national news stories have reported problems about falsification of data. This month, the heads of journalism programs at Stanford University and UC Berkeley wrote a newspaper opinion piece attacking the assessments' credibility, saying the rankings were "bad news for higher education." Among the criteria evaluated by U.S. News are scholarship, curriculum and the quality of faculty and graduate students. In addition, professional school programs are examined using other criteria, including placement of students in jobs.
The dilemma, says law school dean Bruce Wolk, who has participated in a national discussion with other law school deans about the U.S. News assessments, is that a Top-Twenty-minded public pays attention to these rankings. Other deans at UC Davis agree. Those polled informally last fall stated that, regardless of the accuracy of U.S. News' ratings and those of other top college guides, prospective students and campus supporters are influenced by them.
Since this is the case, they say, the campus should make sure it responds to the survey as best as possible. In fact, over the years professional school staff have begun contacting U.S. News directly to discuss further the criteria and to ensure the publication's staff is well-acquainted with the UC Davis programs. Some send promotional materials to deans involved in the U.S. News surveys.
The programs that rank well make sure people know about it. Press releases, advertising, recruitment materials, speeches and other informational materials about the campus often call attention to how UC Davis placed.
Everyone makes hay while they can.
(More about campus response to ratings.)
