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September 30, 2010

Pitt officials generally pleased with NRC rankings

Pitt senior administrators generally are pleased with new national rankings in a doctoral program report released this week from the National Research Council (NRC).

Provost Patricia Beeson

Provost Patricia Beeson

Overall, Provost Patricia Beeson said, Pitt’s programs did quite well in the NRC study.

“We had a number of programs that advanced, as far as we can tell, from where they were in 1995, some of them spectacularly so. If we look at [molecular] pharmacology, it could be one of the top two or three in the country; microbiology is another one,” she said.

Other Pitt programs that did well in the report are bioengineering, biostatistics, epidemiology, neuroscience, nursing, philosophy and psychology, the provost said. Many others showed marked improvement in the report, including computer science, mathematics and political science, she noted.

When asked if she was surprised by anything in the report, Beeson mentioned the ratings of English, which she said did not reflect its true quality. “I know the English department is better than the data show. I’ve seen the faculty CVs, I know what they have accomplished, I know they have a very strong program. And it’s not just my opinion. They’re one of the highest ranked in terms of placement of students and that is something we think is very important, but is not weighted so highly in the NRC study,” Beeson said.

“It’s also the case that the humanities were the most difficult for the NRC to come up with quantitative measures and weights that are meaningful. In some of the programs you’ll notice the ranges are incredibly wide. It’s not just Pitt’s. In these weights, size of the program ended up being really important. But for some of our programs, we don’t want them to be really big, because we want to be able to focus on mentoring our graduate students and placing the graduate students,” she said.

A&S Dean N. John Cooper

A&S Dean N. John Cooper

In a separate interview, Arts and Sciences Dean N. John Cooper said, “The whole objective was to make the study less of a beauty contest than some rankings are, and for it to be useful to those interested in graduate education, including faculty and prospective students, and I think it succeeds in doing that.”

Cooper noted, “The data are dated and the world of academia does change. For example, if a department was in the middle of hiring a lot of assistant professors in 2005, that would affect the picture.”

Regarding the 20 variables in the study, Cooper said, “It’s a little of a one-size-fits-all. For example with publications, it’s rather arbitrary that [in the evaluation] NRC equates five articles to one book. Depending on the field, five articles could be a goodly amount of publication or a not so strong amount,” Cooper pointed out.

“The same is true for citations, which are critical measures of how important published work is. But they are valued differently, carry different weights, according to the discipline,” he said.

“One thing that stood out for me was how much our psychology graduate education had improved since the 1995 report. I think that reflects the fact that we have devoted resources to the program, in terms of hiring outstanding faculty. The Arts and Sciences component of psychology since 2002 has been centralized in Sennott Square, which promotes collaboration and is better for the recruitment of grad students and gives the department an atmosphere conducive for learning,” Cooper said.

“We have a lot of really excellent faculty in Arts and Sciences and we can certainly look at some of the data and say, How are the faculty resources coming together to improve graduate education? How can we expand our efforts in that area?” he said.

“This is, after all, the National Research Council, so we have to take the report seriously and we do. It is data-based and I’m pleased with what I’ve seen overall in Arts and Sciences. This particular study led us to collect different data than before, and some of that data correspond to our measuring what we’ve been doing, so the data collection process was very useful for us.”

—Peter Hart

Filed under: Feature,Volume 43 Issue 3

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