<p>How reliable is the Gourman Report?? I heard that this has been published in 1996 or even older and so the statistics are very unreliable… is this true or has the Gourman Report updated its rankings???</p>
<p>If I had to put a number on it, I would say it is 90% reliable.</p>
<p>The Gourman Report is reliable enough to use as a starting point in your college search but it has limitations. It is not the ultimate authority. You should always research colleges from any list in depth. The Gourman Report uses an explicit set of criteria that favors larger universities. Consequently, the Gourman Report underestimates (overlooks) Liberal Arts Colleges. The Gourman Report would be more reliable if the data were updated. The data is at least ten years old, but the quality of academic departments generally doesn’t change very quickly. There are some curious omissions from some lists and some curious inclusions in others.</p>
<p>Here is something I posted in another thread:
"I can understand your discomfort with 10-year-old information. But, after studying the Gourman rankings from different angles in different disciplines, I am convinced the rankings are still accurate. I have concluded that departmental quality almost always changes very slowly. </p>
<p>Let me try to persuade you:
(1) The Gourman physics ranking is consistent with current information. The average difference (absolute value) between the Gourman Ranking for Physics and the 2007 US News ranking for graduate programs in physics is only 4.2 positions based on 30 schools. (US News considers the quality of graduate programs an indicator of undergraduate quality at large universities.) The average difference would be much less if it weren’t for two schools with large disagreements. Sixteen out of thirty schools were ranked within three positions of each other. The correlation between the 1997 Gourman undergraduate ranking for physics and the 2007 US News graduate ranking for physics is .80 (very high). </p>
<p>(2) Rankings for physics change very little in ten years. The correlation between the 1997 US News graduate rankings for physics and the 2007 US News graduate rankings for physics was .96 (almost perfect). The average difference between the 1997 US News grad physics ranking and 2007’s is 1.5 positions (absolute value). If very slow change is true for graduate programs which are more subject to change than undergrad, it is certainly more true for undergraduate.</p>
<p>(3) Rankings in other undergraduate disciplines change very little. The correlation between the 1997 US News undergrad ENGINEERING ranking and 2006 is .95 (almost perfect). The average change in US News rank for undergrad engineering 1997 to 2006 was 2.3 positions (absolute value). For undergrad BUSINESS, the US News 1997 ranking with 2006 ranking correlation was .94 (almost perfect). The average change in 1997 versus 2006 business rank was 3.5 postions (absolute value).</p>
<p>For readers who don’t know what “absolute value” means, it is the average ignoring minus signs so a +1 and a -1 difference don’t cancel each other out. </p>
<p>Rankings change negligibly over a ten year period. The Gourman Report is still accurate. </p>
<p>The Gourman Report targeted data relevant to undergraduate education. It is the only ranking available for many undergraduate disciplines. It would be irrational to discount the Gourman Report."</p>
<p>Here is something else I posted in another thread:</p>
<p>"The Gourman Report states that its ratings are based on “extensive reseach” into the following criteria:</p>
<ol>
<li>auspices, control, and organization of the institution</li>
<li>numbers of educational programs offered and degrees conferred (with additional attention to “sub-fields” available to students within a particular discipline</li>
<li>age (experience level) of the institution and the individual discipline or program and division</li>
<li>faculty, including qualifications, experience, intellectual interests, attainments, and professional productivity (including research)</li>
<li>students, including quality of scholastic work and records of graduates both in graduate study and in practice</li>
<li>basis of and requirements for admission of students (overall and by individual discipline)</li>
<li>number of students enrolled (overall and for each discipline)</li>
<li>curriculum and curricular content of the program or discipline and division</li>
<li>standards and quality of instruction (including teaching loads)</li>
<li>quality of administration, including attitudes and policy towards teaching, research and scholarly production in each discipline, and administration research</li>
<li>quality and availability of non-departmental areas such as counseling and career placement services</li>
<li>quality of physical plant devoted to undergraduate, graduate, and professional levels</li>
<li>finances, including budgets, investments, expenditures and sources of income for both public and private institutions</li>
<li>library, including number of volumes, appropriateness of materials to individual disciplines and accessibility of materials</li>
<li>computer facility sufficient to support current research activities for both faculty and students</li>
<li>sufficient funding for research equipment and infrastructure</li>
<li>number of teaching and research assistantships</li>
<li>academic-athletic balance</li>
</ol>
<p>The weight given to each criterion above varies by discipline."</p>
<p>The Gourman Report is a stale resource. I believe the editor is about 100 years old and living in an academic bubble somewhere…</p>
<p>macsuile-
Current information generally corroborates the rankings in the Gourman Report. The rankings could have been made yesterday.</p>
<p>Is the gourman report avaliable online? Is it free, or is like all other sources?</p>
<p>It is available to purchase online as a book. CC lists comments about it:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.collegeconfidential.com/college_rankings/gourman_report.htm[/url]”>http://www.collegeconfidential.com/college_rankings/gourman_report.htm</a></p>
<p>I would like to add that the 1997 Gourman Report rankings are in close agreement with the 2006 rankings from the most knowledgeable posters on CC. </p>
<p>For example, 90% of the time when the Gourman Report says a particular major at a particular university is in the top 10 or the top 20, Alexandre’s rankings agree with the Gourman Report. This is true in all fields from history to astronomy to economics to Arabic.</p>
<p>Doesn’t the rating of a department change from year to year based on the faculty changes?</p>
<p>thethoughtprocess-
Faculty changes should make a difference but I don’t know of any rating that adjusts for that every year. Do you? The Gourman Report hasn’t been updated in 10 years on any dimension. Unfortunately, the Gourman group seems to be defunct. Too bad.</p>
<p>the problem with the gourman report? he made the whole thing up.</p>
<p>1) theres no possible way that so many schools can be ranked without ties or gaps.
2) gourman was provided with no data from colleges and universities. in fact, he never managed to contact any of them to inquire.
3) gourman has no idea how he got his ‘overall’ rankings. he says he averaged departmental rankings for each school, but they come nowhere close to adding up. his explanation for this was that not all departments are ranked in the guide, which is how princetons score managed to jump from 4.72 to 4.95 (this would require the university to have some 300 unranked and perfect programs).
4) the report routinely included programs that dont exist.
5) gourmans own explanations of the criteria differed greatly over ime.</p>
<p>in short, the gourman report is nothing better than something you or i could construct. the strength of graduate programs is pretty well known and thats exactly what gourman seems to have used in constructing his rankings. collegehelps numbers back that up.</p>
<p>ericatbucknell-</p>
<p>Your statements are false. It sounds like you knew Gourman personally. I only know what the book says. I wasn’t around to catch Gourman’s inconsistent explanations during the 1990s like you were.</p>
<p>I will re-read the methods section of the Gourman Report when I have a chance to see what it says. </p>
<p>Your statement that “the report routinely included programs that dont exist” is simply not true. </p>
<p>The Gourman Report rankings correlate with undergraduate rankings in US News (e.g. business and engineering) as well as graduate rankings.
The Gourman rankings correlate with the rankings by some of the most
knowledgeable posters on CC. The Gourman Report correctly captures some little-known programs that are strong in certain areas.</p>
<p>Even if everything you said is true (which it is not), the end-product (the rankings) are valid. This is really all that matters. Whatever method Gourman used, it evidently worked.</p>
<p>I did not hear you say that the rankings were wrong. I think you realize that they are not wrong.</p>
<p>However, the criteria used by Gourman do tend to favor larger universities, ericatbucknell…which is not a discredit to LACs. It is simply their choice and you have to keep that in mind.</p>
<p>collegehelp-</p>
<p>you managed to attack one of my comments. how noble. do i have specific evidence of false reporting of programs? no. has that specific criticism been made within the educational community since the 70s? yes.</p>
<p>which of my other statements are false? </p>
<p>it is statistically impossible to achieve the distribution of ‘scores’ that gourman reports. </p>
<p>gourman himself admitted he did not approach universities for data but rather relied on individual members of faculty and administrations for help. when asked for names, he provided two, one of whom when contacted admitted to have gone so far as to send gourman his departmental newsletter.</p>
<p>gourmans comments about overall rankings can be found in a 1997 article in the chronicle of higher education. the math is mine. </p>
<p>i also managed to find several different methodologies provided by gourman since 1978, all of which have differend from the one you provided.</p>
<p>last, refusing to publish specific criteria is academically dishonest. as a former member of the faculty at csu-northridge, gourman knew this.</p>
<p>does he nontheless manage name the top graduate programs in his rankings? yep. that doesnt seem to be something too difficult, however, since data for graduate programs is significantly easier to locate. and yes, undergraduate engineering and business rankings in usnews basically mirror their respective grad school rankings.</p>
<p>in short, im not sure how mirroring usnews graduate rankings makes gourmans conclusions valid. the same goes for alexandres. what we do have are statistically unfounded and impossible results that mirror graduate school quality. no more, no less. and if youre looking at grad school quality, why not look at the nrc and usnews results, which, though flawed, are honest for what they are.</p>
<p>valid? no more so than something i could put together in a day or two. in fact, i could probably do quite a bit better… and release my methods in the process!</p>
<p>ericatbucknell-
I forgot to mention that there ARE ties in the Gourman Report, but not many. He probably carried his calculations to the thousandths place.</p>
<p>Gourman also produced a version of his book for graduate programs. I’ll compare his undergraduate rankings with his graduate rankings to see how similar they are.</p>
<p>example of Gourman Undergrad versus Graduate rankings
Keep in mind that it would not be surprising if the graduate and undergrad were similar given the criteria. Even US News believes that graduate program quality and undergrad quality are related. </p>
<p>subject: Poly Sci</p>
<p>Gourman GRADUATE rankings for a PhD in Political Science:
(I’ll post the undergrad next for comparison…they are somewhat different)</p>
<p>Yale
U Michigan
UC Berkeley
Harvard
u Chicago
Princeton
Stanford
U Wisconsin
UCLA
Cornell
MIT
Columbia
U Rochester
U Minnesota
Duke
UNC Chapel Hill
U Texas Austin
Johns Hopkins
Ohio State
U Notre Dame
Indiana U Bloomington
U Illinois U-C
UC San Diego
UVA
U Penn
Northwestern
U Pittsburgh
U Washington
Michigan State
U Iowa
Washington U St Louis
Emory
Rutgers
Georgetown</p>
<p>Gourman Report undergraduate ranking in Political Science:
Yale
Harvard
Berkeley
Michigan
Chicago
MIT
Stanford
Wisconsin
Minnesota
Cornell
Princeton
UCLA
Northwestern
UNC Chapel Hill
Columbia
Indiana Bloomington
Duke
Johns Hopkins
Notre Dame
Tufts
Ohio State
U Penn
UVA
Georgetown
Texas Austin
U Washington
U Pittsburgh
U Rochester
Rutgers
Brandeis
Vanderbilt
Illinois UC
Oregon
Maryland CP
Iowa
UC Santa Barbara
SUNY Buffalo
U Mass Amherst
NYU
Michigan St
Syracuse
Washington U St Louis
US Air Force Acad
US Military Acad
Dartmouth
Pomona
Emory
UC Davis
Boston U
Tulane</p>
<p>ericatbucknell-</p>
<p>Maybe the misconception that Gourman rated programs that don’t exist stems from the fact that programs go by different names at different universities. Gourman gave each ranking a title but put a footnote at the bottom of the page when he combined programs of different names. For example, his “aerospace engineering” ranking included programs that went by nine different names.</p>
<p>INTRODUCTION</p>
<p>Since 1967, The Gourman Report has made an intensive effort to determine what
constitutes academic excellence or quality in American colleges and .universities.
The result of that research and study is found within this book. </p>
<p>The Gourman Report is the only qualitative guide to institutions of higher education
that assigns a precise, numerical score to each school and program. This score is
derived from a comprehensive assessment of each program’s strengths and
shortcomings. This method makes it simple to examine the effectiveness of a given
educational program, or compare one program to another. </p>
<p>These deceptively simple numerical ratings take into account a wide variety of
empirical data. The Gourman Report is not a popularity contest or an opinion poll,
but an objective evaluation of complex information drawn from the public record,
private research foundations, and universities themselves. Many of the resources
employed in this research, while public, are not easily accessible. Individual
researchers attempting to collect this data in order to compare institutions or
programs would face a daunting task. </p>
<p>This book is intended for use by: </p>
<p> Young people and parents wishing to make informed choices
about higher education.
Educators and administrators interested in an independent
evaluation of their programs … </p>
<p> Prospective employers who wish to assess the educational
qualifications of college graduates.
Schools wishing to improve undergraduate programs
Foundations involved in funding colleges and universities.
Individuals interested in identifying fraudulent or inferior
institutions …
Citizens concerned about the quality of today’s higher education.
For all of these researchers, the breadth and convenience of the data in The
Gourman Report can greatly facilitate the study of higher education. </p>
<p>Method of Evaluation </p>
<p>Much of the material used in compiling The Gourman Report is internal-drawn
from educators and administrators at the schools themselves. These individuals are
permitted to evaluate only their own programs-as they know them from daily
experience-and not the programs of other institutions. Unsolicited appraisals are </p>
<p>occasionally considered (and weighed accordingly), but the bulk 'of our
contributions come from people chosen for their academic qualifications, their
published works, and their interest in improving the quality of higher education. It
attests to the dedication of these individuals (and also to the serious problems in
higher education today) that over 90% of our requests for contributions are met
with a positive response. </p>
<p>In addition, The Gourman Report draws on many external resources which are a
matter of record, such as funding for public universities as authorized by legislative
bodies, required filings by schools to meet standards of non-discrimination, and
material provided by the institutions (and independently verified) about faculty
makeup and experience, fields of study offered, and physical plant. </p>
<p>Finally, The Gourman Report draws upon the findings of individuals, associations </p>
<p>and agencies whose business it is to make accurate projections of the success that </p>
<p>will be enjoyed by graduates from given institutions and disciplines. While the </p>
<p>methods employed by these resources are proprietary, their findings have </p>
<p>consistently been validated by experience, and they are an important part .of our </p>
<p>research. </p>
<p>The Gourman Report’s rating of educational institutions is analogous to the grading
of a college essay examination. What may appear to be a subjective process is in
fact a patient sifting of empiricar data by analysts who understand both the “subject
matter” (the fields of study under evaluation), and the “students” (the colleges and
universities themselves). The fact that there are virtually no “tie” scores indicates
the accuracy and effectiveness of this methodology. So does the consistent
affirmation of the ratings in The Gourman Report by readers who are in a position
to evaluate certain programs themselves. </p>
<p>The following criteria are taken into consideration in the evaluation of each
educational program and institution. It should be noted that, because disciplines
vary in their educational methodology, the significance given each criterion will vary
from the rating of one discipline to the next; however, our evaluation is consistent
for all schools listed within each field of study. </p>
<ol>
<li>Auspices, control and organization of the institution; </li>
<li>Number of educational programs offered and degrees conferred
(with additional attention to “sub-fields” available to students
within a particular discipline);</li>
<li>Age (experience level) of the institution and of the individual
discipline or program and division;</li>
<li>Faculty, including qualifications, experience, intellectual interests,
attainments, and professional productivity (including research);</li>
<li><p>Students, including quality of scholastic work and records of
graduates both in graduate study and in practice;
The Goullnan Report-Undergraduate </p></li>
<li><p>Basis of and requirements for admission of students (overall and
by individual discipline) </p></li>
<li><p>Number of students enrolled (overall and for each discipline); </p></li>
<li><p>Curriculum and curricular content of the program or discipline
and division;</p></li>
<li><p>Standards and quality of instruction (including teaching loads); </p></li>
<li><p>Quality of administration, including attitudes and policy toward
teaching, research and scholarly production in each discipline,
and administration research;</p></li>
<li><p>Quality and availability of non-departmental areas such as
counseling and career placement services;</p></li>
<li><p>Quality of physical plant devoted to undergraduate, graduate and
professional levels; </p></li>
<li><p>Finances, including budgets, investments, expenditures and
sources of income for both public and private institutions;</p></li>
<li><p>Library, including number of volumes, appropriateness of
materials to individual disciplines, and accessibility of materials;</p></li>
<li><p>Computer facility sufficient to support current research activities
for both faculty and students;</p></li>
<li><p>Sufficient funding for research equipment and infrastructure; </p></li>
<li><p>Number of teaching and research assistantships; </p></li>
<li><p>Academic-athletic balance.
ipecific information about the data used to rank institutions and programs is
Ivailable in Appendix A and Appendix B.</p></li>
</ol>