<p>Incidentally, if USN&WR wanted to assess the “scholarly quality” of a program, it would be much more rational to do so by objective criteria such as number of publications per faculty, number of citations per faculty, or number of faculty who have received awards/distinctions, sit in editorial boards of top journals, and are members of the select scientific academies and technical committees. An open survey of deans, many of whom don’t even return the survey form, is a pretty poor and unreliable measure of scholarly quality. That’s why international rankings like those from THES (Times of London Higher Education Supplement) are far more accurate than the USN&WR ranking.</p>