Rankings

[TheDude]

Has anyone used this site?

What are your thoughts in terms of it's validity?

http://graduate-school.phds.org/

[fluffy]

Its not very accurate because it is based on the NRC rankings which are bogus as can be seen with a quick google search: http://www.google.co...=nrc%20rankings You're better off with the US News rankings than the NRC ones.

[Kitkat]

I think that all rankings should be taken with a grain of salt, both the NRC and the US News & World report. With the NRC it does seem to be missing some important information and doesn't include all of the universities in the US. But the same sort of thing can be said of the US News ones. The US News ones just tell you which ones have the biggest name recognition, which isn't always the best thing when looking at grad schools. In my field the name of the institution isn't as important as who I am working with and what I am doing. So I guess what I am saying is, it depends on what you are going for really.

[fluffy]

It's true that rankings should be taken with a grain of salt since the quality of an institution can't really be evaluated on a absolute linear scale; still, if you read about it the NRC rankings are based on bogus data and are not worth worrying about at all. One can at least hope that the US News rankings are not (admittedly I do not know their methodology). Still, it seems safe to say that the US News rankings are a much better approximation of reality than the NRC ratings. Also, name recognition isn't everything but it is still important and there is a fairly strong correlation between name recognition and the quality of the school; this is likely partly a self fufilling prophesy but that is irrelevant.

[TheDude]

I read some articles pertaining to this last night. It seems like schools are willing to accept NRC rankings if it helps their cause and quick to dismiss if it doesn't. There are definitely some holes in analyses that I read about, but at least we know how they looked at things. I still don't know how US News approaches the issue.

[fluffy]

Seems their ranking is based on reputation and "statistical indictors" http://www.usnews.co...e-numbers.html. Anyway, if you are going to look at rankings its better to go with a ranking that has some chance of being done properly than one we know is wrong.