<p>Jags,</p>
<p>ND may not be moving up in US News but I know many people, especially on the graduate side, who argue that US News is not a valid indicator. It is something I heard a lot on my interviews! Here is an example.</p>
<p>Clinical psychology programs are rated by sending out a questionnaire to the head of the department for every school which has a clinical psychology program, and they are asked to rank order all of the programs. There are two problems with this. First of all, the head of the department is oftentimes, more often than not in fact, not a clinical psychologist. They are rating something outside of their field. Secondly, there is only a 30% response rate, which US News doesn’t mention, so there could very well be a response bias. </p>
<p>I don’t know as many specifics about how it is done on the undergraduate level, but I WOULD NOT trust that peer score if my life depended on it. Look at the objective scores, because the subjective oftentimes will lead you astray for all of the reasons we mentioned.</p>
<p>You can keep defending the rankings if you want, but they are arbitrary. ND business was 3rd last year, 7th this year, clearly we screwed up right? Not necessarily. Also, people take advantage of the rankings. WashU has been WELL-KNOWN to waitlist a ton of people to keep their acceptance rates low and to boost their US News rankings. If you want to talk about how schools get high on the list, talk about that, don’t try to argue departments because we have as many strong departments as the schools you mentioned. ND just doesn’t play games with students just to raise their rankings, we put students first.</p>