Grad schools deem rankings unimportant

The points are long tallied, and the results of U.S. News and World Report's rankings of graduate schools are in -- but at Penn, some claim they are also largely irrelevant to the schools and students they attempt to profile.

"There are 20 rankings of business schools now, and it's hard to get excited about any one of them," Wharton School Dean Patrick Harker said. "It's diluted the value of each one, and in some ways, that's a good thing."

Harker, echoing his colleagues and University students across almost every school and department, added that rankings tend to be flawed, as they "assume each school does exactly the same thing and that you can put them in a line and list them from one to 10."

Many of the University's graduate programs landed firmly in the top 10. The School of Nursing and the School of Veterinary Medicine fared well, each landing a spot in the top five.

The Wharton School saw a slight rise, taking the number two slot with Stanford's business school. Penn's Law School and the School of Medicine both kept their previous ranks, while the graduate program of the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Graduate School of Education each fell one spot to 29 and six, respectively .

Penn's administrators do not seem inclined to change just to please people.

"The official philosophy is [that] we are who we are," Engineering School Dean Eduardo Glandt said.

Graduate School of Education Assistant Dean Tom Kecskemethy concurred.

"I can tell you, this school of education doesn't run any program according to what we think U.S. News" wants to see, he said.

The rankings themselves are based on inappropriate criteria, according to Glandt.

"The methods that they use are not things that apply to engineering," Glandt said, noting that U.S. News tends to consider employment of graduates in the field as a positive sign, while Engineering faculty loathe to "play God" and force students with engineering degrees to become engineers.

"We have a record number of people going to graduate school, going to medical school," Glandt said, adding that many students pursuing dual degrees, especially with Wharton, are often more likely to end up on Wall Street than in a lab, contributing to the school's standing.

"It's a philosophical question for the school," Glandt continued. "Do we go to cultivate a PR value and look at things like where our students go, or do we just try to be good and let the chips fall where they may?"

Interestingly, many of the Engineering School's programs have been ranked in the top 10 in the nation by the National Research Council, which ranks Ph.D. programs individually.

"In academia, that's the only thing that counts," Glandt said, adding that he is expecting computer science to join the school's bioengineering, chemical engineering and material science programs in the NRC's top 10 when the rankings, announced every 10 years, are released in 2004.

Graduate students themselves also seem unmoved by U.S. News' rankings.

"Wharton has been at the top for a long time," first-year Wharton graduate student Arnold Frias said.

Though the rankings are "good for morale -- especially when a lot of people, MBAs are having a hard time getting jobs," Frias concluded that they don't "really affect us that much in the short run."

He said that "the quality of the school is still the same regardless of what the rankings are."

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