Montreal, Canada
June 16, 2002
June 16, 2002
June 19, 2002
2153-5965
14
7.1176.1 - 7.1176.14
10.18260/1-2--10055
https://peer.asee.org/10055
511
Main Menu Session 2255
The Relative Contribution of Department Ranking to College Ranking in Engineering Graduate Program Rankings Conducted by U.S. News and World Report
Bruce A. Vojak, James V. Carnahan, and Raymond L. Price
Department of General Engineering University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Abstract
College rankings conducted by various popular magazines have generated both considerable interest and controversy, with concerns focused both on the formulas used by the magazines and the data supplied by the ranked schools. The present work seeks to circumvent the confounding nature of these issues by (1) considering only “reputation” rankings by academics and (2) using the discrepancy between college rankings and departmental rankings to provide insight into how the rankings of various departments contribute to the rank of the college they comprise. In this work, we present an analysis of 12 years of U.S. News and World Report graduate school “reputation” rankings for engineering colleges and departments, using it to reveal the relative perceived contributions of various disciplines to college rank.
Background
College rankings conducted by various popular magazines have generated both considerable interest and controversy over the past decade. However, while certain groups of prospective students increasingly rely on such rankings 1, a number of academics openly question their validity. Many express concern with the magazines’ choices of measures and quantitative formulas used to obtain the “overall” rank for a college 2-7, as well as with their peer’s choices of data supplied to the magazine conducting the ranking 8-11.
In the specific case of the U.S. News and World Report rankings of engineering colleges, the “overall” rank for a college currently is calculated by using a weighted quantitative formula 12-14 that incorporates the following measures12:
· Reputation (40%) – measured by separate surveys of both academics and corporate recruiters · Student selectivity (10%) – measured by GRE quantitative and analytic scores, as well as by the proportion of applicants accepted
Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright ã 2002, American Society for Engineering Education
Main Menu
Carnahan, J., & Vojak, B., & Price, R. (2002, June), The Relative Contribution Of Department Ranking To College Ranking In Engineering Graduate Program Rankings Conducted By U.S. News And World Report Paper presented at 2002 Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada. 10.18260/1-2--10055
ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2002 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015