| Still, redbeard's got a point. A really good one, too. These rankings are determined by an algorithm developed by US News. They rank various things based upon various faculty members' opinions and some statistics and ratios, based upon what everyone feels are the "most important" statistics and ratios and opinions, those elements that make good programs better than others. Then, you get some programs ranking within a point or two of other programs, and several clustered all together... It's a thousand guesses slapped together and then it's sliced delicately into discrete ranks.
So, it's all conjecture, anyhow. What makes a program good? The French didn't come up with the phrase "je ne sais quoi" for nothin'. It's really tough to pinpoint why various programs are better than others, so there really is a whole lot of "divining" going on.
That being said...
These rankings aren't completely and totally worthless. There's some method to the madness. Just, please, take all the rankings with a grain of salt. The number five institution may actually be better than the number 4 institution, especially when you're talking about the highly personal and incredibly subjective matching of a student to a school.
Pretty much anything in the top twenty or thirty programs will provide you with a comparable education. From that list of the top chunk of programs, see which environment fits you best, where you feel most comfortable. Even so, don't rule out other programs that aren't ranked, either. I know several folks from weird backgrounds that have gone to get into amazing grad programs and have secured their ultimate dream jobs. Heck, Einstein was a patent clerk. |