hooner@athena.mit.edu (Dave Ko) (09/27/87)
The Gourman report is the premier source in the nation on the top undergraduate schools in each field. They use fourteen different factors to rate the programs. I'll list a few fields and the top schools overall ... CS (of course the most important) 1 MIT 2 Carnegie-Mellon 3 Cal-Berkeley 4 Cornell 5 Illinois 6 Yale 7 UCLA 8 Washington 9 Texas 10 Wisconsin 11 Maryland 12 USC 13 Princeton 14 Utah 15 SUNY-Stony Brook 16 Brown 17 NYU 18 Penn 19 Rochester 20 UMass-Amherst 21 Minnesota(minneapolis) 22 Georgia Tech 23 Cal Tech 24 Ohio State 25 Rice 26 Duke 27 Northwestern 28 SUNY-Buffalo 29 Syracuse 30 UC Irvine 31 UC San Diego 32 Columbia 34 Indiana 35 Penn State 36 UC Santa Barbara 37 Pittsburgh 38 Iowa State 39 Kansas 40 Virginia 42 Iowa 44 SMU 45 Navy 46 Army 47 Houston 48 RPI 49 Washington/St Louis 50 Michigan State 54 Texas A&M 55 Oklahoma 56 Kansas State 57 Michigan 58 Washington State graduate schools in CS 1 Stanford 2 MIT 3 Carnegie-Mellon 4 Berkeley 5 Cornell 6 Illinois Electrical Engineering (undergrad) 1 MIT 2 Stanford 3 Berkeley 4 Illinois 5 UCLA 6 Cornell 7 Purdue 8 USC 9 Princeton 10 Michigan 11 Carnegie-Mellon 12 Polytech Institute (Brooklyn, NY) 13 Texas 14 Columbia 15 Maryland 16 Ohio State 17 Georgia Tech 18 Minnesota 19 Northwestern 20 UCSB 21 John Hopkins 22 RPI 23 Wisconsin 24 Rice 25 UC San Diego 26 Florida 27 Penn 28 Brown 29 Colorado 30 Washington/St Louis 31 Arizona 32 Yale 33 Syracuse 34 Penn State 36 Michigan State 37 UMass/Amherst 38 Virginia Tech 40 Notre Dame 42 Iowa State 43 NC State 44 Washington 45 Texas Tech 46 SMU 47 UC Davis 48 Duke 49 SUNY-Stony Brook 50 Tennessee 52 Kansas 53 Pittsburgh 55 Colorado State 56 SUNY-Buffalo 57 Utah 58 Air Force graduate schools in EE 1 MIT 2 Berkeley 3 Stanford Illinois 4 UCLA 5 Cornell USC 6 Purdue 7 Caltech Princeton top schools overall 1 Princeton 2 Harvard 3 Michigan 4 Yale 5 Stanford 6 Berkeley 7 Cornell 8 U of Chicago 9 Wisconsin 10 UCLA 11 MIT 12 Caltech 13 UC San Diego 14 Northwestern 15 Pennsylvania 16 Columbia 17 Minnesota 18 Brown 19 Duke 20 Dartmouth 21 Brandeis 22 Illinois 23 Indiana 24 Johns Hopkins 25 Washington 26 UC Davis 27 North Carolina 28 NYU 29 SUNY-Buffalo 30 Iowa 31 Rice 32 Notre Dame 33 Ohio State 34 Carnegie-Mellon 35 Texas 36 Penn State 37 UC Santa Barbara 38 UC Irvine 39 Vanderbilt 40 Virginia 41 Rochester 42 Georgia Tech 43 Tufts 44 Purdue 45 Michigan State 46 Rutgers 47 UC Riverside 48 SUNY-Stony Brook 49 Washington/St Louis 50 Air Force I'll post other departments and more info later. If anyone has any specific inquiries (ie "Where did my school place in biochem?"), send me email. I mostly have only the sciences, but that includes poli sci and econ. Hope you enjoyed this hooner@athena.mit.edu ...!bloom-beacon!athena!hooner
coleman@CS.UCLA.EDU (09/28/87)
In article <1503@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> hooner@athena.mit.edu (Dave Ko) writes: >The Gourman report is the premier source in the nation >on the top undergraduate schools in each field. They >use fourteen different factors to rate the programs. >I'll list a few fields and the top schools overall ... [various rankings included here...] I completely disagree. There have been many articles written which disparage the Gourman report as a ranking of college programs. In fact, at my undergraduate school (UMKC) the report was kept in ready reference and if requested, was always handed out with a disclaimer by the reference librarian and a manilla folder full of these commentary articles. But more significantly, even a cursory look at the figures which are supposed to justify these rankings should convince anyone that they are cooked and that some subjective criteria (probably the opinion of Mr. Gourman himself) is being used to create these rankings. If you scan the book, each page has a format similar to this: <discipline> school overall <criterion-1> <criterion-2> <etc....> Foo U. 4.59 4.56 4.53 ... Foo Tech. 4.58 4.54 4.52 ... Foo State 4.56 4.53 4.51 ... etc.... .... .... .... ... The criteria here are things like "faculty," "library," etc. (I don't remember exactly.) The thing that is immediately apparent here is that all of these columns of numbers are DECREASING, or at least non-increasing. Doesn't that seem odd? I mean, does any one that there are NO cases within the top 50 or so schools in each discipline in which, say school A has a better <criterion-1> than school B, but school B has a better <criterion-2> than school A???? Unless there is something very strange about the ways these numbers are being acquired and combined, as an objective ranking, this book REEKS! Now it just so happens that the rankings themselves are not too wildly out of sync with what most knowledgable people in the field would put forth, but I'm not willing to take the Gourman report's word for it... I don't think that too many people would argue that MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie-Mellon are the big three in graduate computer science programs, but the Gourman Report did not say so in previous years... So, where can the prospective grad student go for a more objective source of information? I would suggest a five-volume set called (approximately) An Assessment of Research Doctoral Programs in the United States. Something like that anyway. I think it's put out by the NSF or some branch thereof. It contains the results of faculty surveys of quality, as well as a great deal of objective data (library holdings, publication rate, grant monies, etc.) with which to evaluate your school in question. The schools are NOT actually ranked, but a little figuring will tell you the approximate rankings... I would have much more confidence in the stated results of this report than those of Gourman. A shortcoming of this report is it only ranks (graduate) programs of Ph.D. granting schools, but then, most student who are actually interested in the ranking of the school would probably not consider going to a non-Ph.D. granting grad school anyway... There are other such reports, I understand. I've heard of a ranking put out by the National Academy of Sciences. These would also be worth checking... And finally, it is worth considering that there is some variation in schools by specialization. For example, Purdue is considered (in my opinion) to be a pretty good computer science school (although I don't see it in the computer science rankings of Gourman), but if you wanted to study artificial intelligence, it would probably not be as good of a place to go because it's not their specialty (someone correct me if this is wrong). Look first, then leap. ** Mike Coleman ** ARPANET: coleman@cs.ucla.edu **
hooner@athena.mit.edu (Dave Ko) (09/28/87)
I don't know what Gourman report he was looking at, but I've never seen anything but the "overall" figures for each school, not criterion-1/criterion-2 etc. And the fourteen factors are things such as quality of grad school placement, rigorous admissions standard, evaluation by peers (ie most of the college professors in the field), quality of faculty, availability of resources, etc. Now even when you say that they're based on "faculty" and "library", that doesn't discredit what Gourman does. I mean come on, the quality of faculty is one of the biggest indications of how good a school is. It's an interdependent cycle- quality faculty attracts quality staff, which attracts quality students, and both of which garner added funds for a program ... and "library" ratings are very important too for liberal arts. When you're doing research in poli sci or sociology, the availability of ample journal citings and references is totally important in gathering knowledge. I'll still stand by my statement that the Gourman reports are the premier UNDERGRADUATE ranking in the country. Maybe he missed that word, but Gourman does NOT rank grad schools. At least the book I'm talking about does not. If they do, that could be poor ... but I'm solid behind the undergrad rankings. I think that it's a VERY good indicator of the best schools in the country in each field. Of course, these rankings alone as they stand in the bboard posting could be misleading, as I should have caveated (sorry) ... for example, Stanford has a very good comp sci program (although many of its students would disagree because they use undergrad instructors) but is not even ranked in comp sci because their program is a subset of their #2 EE program. As for grad rankings, they are much more stable and less subject to subjectivity than the undergrad. But they are not from Gourman, they are from an educational journal. I have seen many grad school rankings and they match almost school by school every time. Notice that the rankings I cited do not try to rank beyond the top 6 to 10, as going beyond that would be much more difficult as ignorance and other subjective factors would play more of a role. Dave hooner@athena.mit.edu
andy@rocky.STANFORD.EDU (Andy Freeman) (09/28/87)
In article <1507@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> hooner@athena.mit.edu (Dave Ko) writes: >... for example, Stanford has a very good >comp sci program (although many of its students would >disagree because they use undergrad instructors) but is not >even ranked in comp sci because their program is a subset >of their #2 EE program. Undergrad instructors are used in intro classes at Stanford. If you're going to take a lot of them, this might be important.... (BTW - The worst intro class instructor I've ever seen here was a full professor. Perhaps the individual is more important than the rank....) One of the things liked back when I was an undergrad here (long before there was a CS major) was that I could take grad CS classes. Seems like a fair trade to me. Since no one has gone all the way through the undergrad CS program here yet, it doesn't make much sense to compare it to anything else yet. BTW - Stanford's undergrad CS program is NOT a subset of the EE program. Stanford's CS department wasn't even in the engineering school until last year. It has never been part of the EE department. (The two departments cooperate when convenient. The CE program is one example.) I don't think the administrative structure should be part of the ranking (its effects on quality should though), but if Gourman does he should at least get it right. Gourman may be the premier undergrad ranking, but that doesn't make it any good. Every year we go through this. Someone tries to find out where he gets his data and how he manipulates it. He uses all of the right words, but there's an underlying iceberg of bogusness. The rankings have changed drastically in the past couple years, even though the schools haven't. (They now agree more with popular conceptions.) Was he making up his data before, now, or both? -andy -- Andy Freeman UUCP: {arpa gateways, decwrl, sun, hplabs, rutgers}!sushi.stanford.edu!andy ARPA: andy@sushi.stanford.edu (415) 329-1718/723-3088 home/cubicle
narten@percival.cs.purdue.edu (Thomas Narten) (09/29/87)
One more tidbit that questions the validity of the rankings in
Gourman's report. Note that Purdue's Computer Science Department is
not in the list of CS departments. When the report first came out,
this caused a lot of head scratching amongst us. It turns out that
Purdue's CS Dept. didn't get included in the survey because someone
(on our end) neglected to fill out some sort of questionaire. In other
words, the amount (or lack) of effort a school put into participating
in the study influenced their position in the final rankings!
--
Thomas Narten
narten@cs.purdue.edu or {ihnp4, allegra}!purdue!nartendparter@ccvaxa.UUCP (09/30/87)
> The Gourman report is the premier source in the nation > on the top undergraduate schools in each field. They > use fourteen different factors to rate the programs. could you please post the fourteen factors? thanks, --david --------- David W. Parter gould/csd - urbana arpa: dparter@gswd-vms --or-- dparter@gswd-vms.gould.com uucp: ihnp4!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!dparter
reggie@pdn.UUCP (09/30/87)
In article <625@rocky.STANFORD.EDU>, andy@rocky.STANFORD.EDU (Andy Freeman) writes: > > Gourman may be the premier undergrad ranking, but that doesn't make > it any good. Every year we go through this. Someone tries to find > out where he gets his data and how he manipulates it. He uses all > of the right words, but there's an underlying iceberg of bogusness. > The rankings have changed drastically in the past couple years, even > though the schools haven't. (They now agree more with popular > conceptions.) Was he making up his data before, now, or both? > I agree with Andy. I have looked at some of the Gourman Reports over the past years and also some of the well known Guides to Colleges that are issued each year. If you think about it, rating all of the universities in this country is a difficult and time consuming task. Given that just how much useful information can be obtained to come up with a fair comparison? And who knows about a program more than the students themselves who have gone through one? At best one can hope to find people who have participated in more than one program and can make comparisons between them. But even this has a limited value. You can easily find two people who went to the same university in the same department with a wide difference of opinions, due to different classes, instructors, etc.... that were encountered within a program. True, quality of faculty, library, etc.... go a long way towards shaping a program, but on what criteria is faculty judged? In an undergraduate program I feel that teaching ability is far more critical than research and publication history. While at the graduate level, where the student needs to be more independent, the focus should be on research opportunities. The later is easier to judge than the former. Teaching ability is a highly subjective measure. What makes an effective teacher? I'm sure we could kick this one around for a while. BTW: In my travels I have found that no matter where people work, live, or attend school you can always find people who want to complain, even at the most highly thought of places. Rather than focus on what is the number 1 school in some subject, I feel the potential student should understand what he/she wants in a program and try to find the right match. -- George W. Leach Paradyne Corporation {gatech,codas,ucf-cs}!usfvax2!pdn!reggie Mail stop LF-207 Phone: (813) 530-2376 P.O. Box 2826 Largo, FL 34649-2826
shan@mcf.UUCP (Sharan Kalwani) (10/02/87)
In article <8359@shemp.UCLA.EDU> coleman@CS.UCLA.EDU (Michael Coleman) writes: >In article <1503@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> hooner@athena.mit.edu (Dave Ko) writes: >>The Gourman report is the premier source in the nation >>on the top undergraduate schools in each field. They >>use fourteen different factors to rate the programs. >>I'll list a few fields and the top schools overall ... > >[various rankings included here...] [various points mentioned here] > >So, where can the prospective grad student go for a more objective >source of information? I would suggest a five-volume set called >(approximately) An Assessment of Research Doctoral Programs in the [more stuff deleted here] > >There are other such reports, I understand. I've heard of a ranking Well most of the graduate students I know (including myself) regularly consult the ACM Directory published for students. This is actually an assistantship directory but it does contain a lot of useful info, like areas of research interest, degrees awarded, what sort of hardware/software we can get to play with, etc. It does help the prospective grad student with some info in order to choose a school. As far as rankings go, this directory doesn't say anything at all, but it is more important(in my opinion) to choose a place where you can enjoy or feel you will do well in whatever major stream you choose, rather than base one's decision on pure rankings alone. Specific listings in specific majors helps a lot. -- Sharan Kalwani Dept. of Physiology/Biophysics Michigan Cancer Foundation 110 East Warren Avenue,Detroit,Michigan 48201 ...!{ihnp4!mibte, philabs!fmsrl7}!mcf!shan OR shan@mcf.UUCP mcf!shan@psuvax1.{psu.edu,BITNET} OR +1 313 833 0710 x411
hooner@athena.mit.edu.UUCP (10/03/87)
In article <1449@pdn.UUCP> reggie@pdn.UUCP (George W. Leach) writes: >In article <625@rocky.STANFORD.EDU>, andy@rocky.STANFORD.EDU (Andy Freeman) writes: > I agree with Andy. I have looked at some of the Gourman Reports >over the past years and also some of the well known Guides to Colleges >that are issued each year. If you think about it, rating all of the >universities in this country is a difficult and time consuming task. >Given that just how much useful information can be obtained to come >up with a fair comparison? I think that there are certain factors that objectively show how good a program at a given school is. Yes, you can argue with them, but when you put a lot of them together, the composite gives a pretty good indication. A good factor is placement in grad school- the number of people from undergrad school A that grad school B lets in compared to the number of people from undergrad school C is a good indication of what grad school B thinks of A and C. Do this for most schools and you get a pretty good indication. And by taking a national sample, you cross-cancel any regional bias. > And who knows about a program more than >the students themselves who have gone through one? At best one can >hope to find people who have participated in more than one program >and can make comparisons between them. But even this has a limited >value. You can easily find two people who went to the same university >in the same department with a wide difference of opinions, due to >different classes, instructors, etc.... that were encountered within a >program. But all that shows is how cocky the students are that go to that school. Maybe that should be weighted in as one factor, but not much weight should be given. Now if you ask the students what they think of other schools ... > True, quality of faculty, library, etc.... go a long way towards >shaping a program, but on what criteria is faculty judged? In an >undergraduate program I feel that teaching ability is far more >critical than research and publication history. While at the >graduate level, where the student needs to be more independent, >the focus should be on research opportunities. The later is easier >to judge than the former. Teaching ability is a highly subjective >measure. What makes an effective teacher? I'm sure we could >kick this one around for a while. Well, I think it's obvious that the way they're going to judge a faculty is not by things such as teaching ability, which would be very hard to measure. Instead they're going to look at tenure, educational background, etc. But quality of faculty could mean more than just how well they can teach or how much research or how many journal articles they've written. Even something as seemingly irrelevant as how well they compose a problem set could make a big difference. Here at MIT, for example, there are frat guys who never go to class on Fridays because of hangovers from Thursday night parties, but because the profs demand so much in the problem sets and pinpoint the knowledge needed to be gained from the reading by incorporating many important concepts in a problem, a student could theoretically never use the teaching ability of the faculty but still would gain much more than a student at another university did in a similar course because the prof knew how to make the student learn the best from the problem set. >BTW: In my travels I have found that no matter where people work, live, or >attend school you can always find people who want to complain, even at the >most highly thought of places. Rather than focus on what is the number 1 >school in some subject, I feel the potential student should understand what >he/she wants in a program and try to find the right match. I think that's true too. I hope everyone who's been following the net realizes that these rankings shouldn't neccesarily be given much weight when deciding on grad schools or even undergrad. There are so many factors besides how good the department you want to major in happens to be that would decide whether that school is right. Dave Ko hooner@athena.mit.edu
marshek@ut-ngp.UUCP (MAt) (10/05/87)
Does anyone have an idea of rankings of international schools in engineering/CS ? Any reliable (GOURMAN sounds extremely vague) sources for the same? Thanx, MAt