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April 13, 2000

Pitt schools, programs listed in annual U.S. News & World Report rankings

Pitt was ranked among the nation's top graduate schools in several disciplines by U.S. News & World Report's annual rankings of America's best graduate schools.

The magazine measures grad programs in five major disciplines (business, education, engineering, law and medicine), using objective measures, such as entering students' test scores and faculty/student ratios, and reputation ratings drawn from inside and outside academia.

The information was published in the magazine's April 10 edition.

Pitt's School of Medicine was tied for 19th overall and was rated 37th for primary care among the top 50 schools listed in each category. The School of Education tied for 33rd among the top 50.

The School of Law was ranked in the second tier, numbers 51-97, which are listed alphabetically. A total of 174 law schools were ranked nationwide.

U.S. News also ranks master's and doctoral programs in other disciplines, with the information available on the magazine's Web site (www.usnews.com). Programs in the arts, sciences, social sciences and the allied health fields are ranked only by reputation as measured by surveys of deans and school administrators within their discipline.

School-wide rankings included Pitt graduate programs in library science (tied for 3rd, among 24 programs listed), nursing (12th, among 175), public health (tied for 13th, among 18), social work (tied for 13th, among 79) and public affairs (20th, among 146).

Commenting on the U.S. News rankings, Provost James Maher said, "We do follow these rankings because we think the students we want to recruit follow these rankings, and for that reason they are important." But Maher said he was cautious of the rankings' criteria when it came to effecting changes in policy or increasing expenditures.

"We try to understand what are the components of the rankings and to find out whether we agree with U.S. News & World Report or the other magazines involved in various cases before we start thinking about changing anything," the provost said, "because sometimes, we just don't agree with the way they're weighting things. One example that I have discussed with U.S. News and World Report is that in the case of law schools, they put a rather heavy weighting on simply the total amount of money that gets spent."

Within the five disciplines, U.S. News & World Report bases its rankings on data collected each fall from more than 1,000 statistical surveys and 13,000 "reputational" surveys.

Deans, program directors and senior faculty are asked to judge the overall academic quality of programs in their field. Nonacademicians are asked to submit a list of up to 25 schools that they consider to be the best in their field.

Additionally, in medicine, U.S. News surveys residency program directors; in law, hiring partners at law firms and professionals in public service; in education, superintendents from large school districts are asked to identify the best schools based on their experience in hiring graduates; and in business and engineering, corporate recruiters, including recruiters who attended job fairs, are canvassed for their knowledge of business and engineering programs.

According to U.S. News & World Report, the statistical measures that account for the greatest proportion of a school's ranking fall into two categories: inputs (resources that students and schools bring to the educational process, such as mean undergraduate grade point average of entering students and the number of faculty members engaged in research) and outputs (such as bar exam success rates for law school graduates or the mean starting salary of new MBAs).

Maher said, "We're very happy to have things that you might think money expenditures could affect, like performance of students or success of students later, or performance of faculty, that could conceivably come out of spending more money — we're happy to have those be components.

"But if those things aren't affected by spending money, then just spending more money might mean that you're just a very inefficient organization. I do think that things like the National Research Council rankings, where they go out to other experts at other schools and try to find out what their perceptions of our programs might be, are much more useful rankings. They're done by people who really know something about the subject.

"There's such a wide variety of quality of rankings," he added.

U.S. News and World Report rankings of individual programs and subdisciplines at Pitt include:

* Within library science, Pitt was ranked in the following subdisciplines: health librarianship (1st, among 6 programs listed), information systems (3rd, among 11), archives and preservation (4th, among 10) and services for children and youth (tied for 4th, among 10).

* The Graduate School of Public Health's health policy and management program was tied for 18th (among 19 such programs listed) and its health services administration program came in tied for 26th (among 40).

* Among medical schools, Pitt was ranked 13th (among 20) in the subdiscipline of women's health and tied for 20th (among 23) in pediatrics.

* In public affairs, the nonprofit management program ranked 6th (among 18) and public policy analysis ranked tied for 21st (among 34).

* Among educational specialties, the educational psychology program ranked 19th (among 27).

* Pitt was ranked among Ph.D. programs for psychology (tied for 30th, among 108), English (33rd, among 68), political science (tied for 39th, among 59), economics (tied for 39th, among 64) and history (tied for 49th, among 65). The creative writing master's program tied for 20th, among 94.

* In the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, three programs were ranked: physical therapy (tied for 3rd, among 80), speech/language pathology (tied for 18th, among 106) and audiology (tied for 23rd, among 66).

* The Katz Graduate School of Business had three ranked programs: the executive MBA (tied for 15th, among 17), the part-time MBA (tied for 17th, among 28) and management information systems (tied for 18th, among 33).

* In the School of Law, Pitt's four-year-old health law program tied for 13th (among 17) as a law specialty program.

–Peter Hart and Bruce Steele


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