Harvard Tops Annual U.S. News Grad School Rankings

The magazine U.S. News and World Report ranked several of Harvard's graduate schools at the top of its annual listing of the country's best.

Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the Graduate School of Education (GSE) were first in their categories, according to the rankings, which were released on Friday.

Harvard Law School (HLS) retained its second place position behind Yale, tying Stanford.

But the Harvard Business School (HBS) fell one spot from last year's top ranking, losing out to Stanford and tying for second with Northwestern University and the University of Pennsylvania.

The graduate school issue is on newsstands today. The rankings can also be found at the magazine's website, www.usnews.com.

The special "America's Best Graduate Schools" guidebook will be available in bookstores tomorrow.

Jerome T. Murphy, dean of the GSE, said he was "delighted" the school was named number one, but reminded students that GSE is only one of many excellent schools.

Murphy said the ranking system can accurately divide schools into broad levels of quality but, beyond that, it is not very useful.

"Of course, I thought they were less useful when we were ranked lower," he joked.

HMS Director of Public Affairs Donald L. Gibbons agreed that while the rankings are widely read they should not be considered infallible.

"We hope people here understand there are flaws in any type of ranking of institutions and that there are a lot of good medical schools out there," Gibbons said.

James E. Aisner '68, associate director of communications at HBS, echoed these concerns in a statement released Friday.

Declining to comment on any specific details of the school's short fall in the rankings, he said, "We're interested in information that helps us evaluate how we're being perceived by our various constituents, and these kinds of surveys are part of that mix."

Aisner said he hoped that prospective students would look beyond the rankings to factors such as teaching methods and curriculum.

Several Harvard graduate students said they did exactly that.

"The rankings played a bit of a role," said first-year law student Bruce W. Hickey, "But you take these things with a grain of salt. They're trying to make distinctions that you can't capture numerically in terms of overall assessments of an institution."

For second-year business student David O. Mann, the rankings were a "key starting point for myself and most of the people I speak to."

But Mann said he believed a drop from number one to number two is not overly important, as most people already have their own opinions of which schools are the best.

The magazine changed its ranking methods this year, according to Kathleen A. Crocker, communications manager for U.S. News and World Report.

Among other changes, the magazine adjusted the measure of instructional expenditures in the law school category to account for cost of living.

It also amended its definition of total pay to include signing bonuses given to business school graduates, and eliminated the practice of measuring the number of recruiters to visit the school.

Crocker said the recruiting figure has lost relevance as an increasing number of business school graduates go on to form their own start-up companies.

Like his fellow administrators, Michael J. Chmura, news director of HLS, said he feels the rankings fail to reflect all pertinent features of a school.

According to Chmura, HLS has a "depth and breadth" of offerings not made evident by the rankings.

He cited the law school's size, student body, library and selection of special programs as factors not recorded by the magazine.

Chmura said he anticipates no change in the system, and predicts that unless such a change arrives, Harvard will continue to fall behind its New Haven rival.

"I'm always confused by [the magazine's] placement figures," Chmura said. "But I say that every year--people are probably getting tired of it by now."