U.S. News & World Report just released its annual rankings of graduate programs nationwide, with Cornell’s professional programs ranking 16th in business, 13th in law, 39th in education, 11th in engineering and 15th in medicine this year. The rankings are based on expert opinions and statistical data gathered in the fall of 2005.
Cornell’s Johnson School of Management ranked 16th among business programs nationwide, down from its 15th rank last year, tying with Carnegie Mellon. Academic officials at peer schools gave the program a 4.1 out of a possible 5.0 points.
Amanda Soule Shaw, senior project manager and financial analyst with the MBA program at the Johnson School, said that the business school is taking these rankings seriously.
“We are looking at these results to see what we should be doing in addition to our current initiatives to improve the quality and reputation of the school.”
In the end, said Shaw, “the Johnson School remains a top business school in the minds of prospective students because it provides unique opportunities for hands-on learning and exposure to all the resources of Cornell in an intense and collaborative community.”
Cornell’s graduate program in education also made the list ranking 39th, tying with the University of Delaware and the University of Missouri-Columbia, and up from a 45th ranking last year. The ranking was based on a weighted average of 12 quality measures surveyed at 276 schools across the country, including student selectivity, faculty resources and quality assessments by education school deans.
The graduate program in engineering at Cornell came in at 11th on the U.S. News’ rankings, up from ranking 12th last year, with a 4.3 overall peer assessment score. Among specialized engineering graduate programs Cornell ranked eighth among industrial/manufacturing programs and ninth for electrical, civil and computer engineering. The rankings were calculated after U.S. News gathered data from 187 schools from a survey of department heads from the American Society for Engineering Education.
Cornell’s Weill Medical School in New York City ranked 15th in the survey, down from 14th last year. The results for this ranking were calculated from the responses of 126 medical schools.
Cornell’s law school also appeared in the rankings, coming in 13th nationwide. For their law school rankings, U.S. News took into consideration the success of each school in job placement for its graduates. Cornell’s law school also placed on the list of “The Most Diverse Schools,” a diversity index based on 2005-2006 student populations.
Cornell’s graduate programs in the sciences also appeared in the rankings, coming in ninth for chemistry and 15th for the earth sciences. Among schools offering specialized computer science programs, Cornell’s artificial intelligence program ranked 10th while its programming language program came in fifth overall. For computer science theory, Cornell ranked fourth. In the field of mathematics, Cornell tied with the University of California-Los Angeles for a 12th place ranking. The program also made the top ten in the specialized fields logic, statistics, and topology (seventh, sixth and 10th, respectively). Cornell’s physics program ranked seventh in the nation.
Archived article by Christine Ryu
Sun Staff Writer