HKS drops to 6th place - USNWR 2022 Rankings, Best Public Policy Schools

[Spoonforkknife]

I acknowledge that USNWR rankings for public public analysis schools aren't as well formulated as law, business and college rankings. But it's very interesting to note the sharp drop in HKS's rank--down to sixth place . I might have my suspicions on why it dropped but I wonder what could have led to this drop. I'm very glad UChicago Harris is in #3 and Duke is in #5. They have been nothing but amazing during the admissions process. 

What do you all think?

[GradSchoolGrad]

On 5/2/2022 at 6:38 PM, Spoonforkknife said:

I acknowledge that USNWR rankings for public public analysis schools aren't as well formulated as law, business and college rankings. But it's very interesting to note the sharp drop in HKS's rank--down to sixth place . I might have my suspicions on why it dropped but I wonder what could have led to this drop. I'm very glad UChicago Harris is in #3 and Duke is in #5. They have been nothing but amazing during the admissions process. 

What do you all think?

It I were to speculate, it is because HKS stop caring about ranking (since they can living off the Harvard brand) and is not investing in the PR and comms campaign necessary for raising rankings (there is a lot of policy community marketing that needs to be done to maintain or raise rankings). This is partly due to how COVID really struck HKS' budget (remember, on paper they are rich, but a lot of their funding goes to dedicated programs, so they have rather limited discretionary funding at the end of the day. 

Harvard Business School (HBS) has also been dropping in the MBA rankings as well. That is because they are taking more risk - as in admitting a more diverse group of students that don't look as a perfect on paper. However, keep in mind, student quality matters for MBA rankings. Policy school rankings is pure beauty contest among those in the policy community. 

[PolicyApplier]

11 hours ago, GradSchoolGrad said:

It I were to speculate, it is because HKS stop caring about ranking (since they can living off the Harvard brand) and is not investing in the PR and comms campaign necessary for raising rankings (there is a lot of policy community marketing that needs to be done to maintain or raise rankings).

This speculation feels correct to me. At least at the Admitted Students Day at UChicago, the people that were considering schools like Harvard, Princeton, or Columbia never mentioned the rankings. Provided they stayed within the top 10 (which doesn't even apply to Columbia), the presumption seemed to be that the name of the university alone was enough. People were willing to take on the nearly 200k (with the obvious exception being Princeton) based on name alone.