Which is more accurate?
Neither, because rankings don’t have inherent, objective qualities of “accuracy.” Different rankings are simply different measures of programs’ comparability, ordered based on criteria the creators of the rankings thought were important.
The National Research Council has a specific methodology it uses. They have an extensive manual detailing it [here[/url] (start at page 49 for the relevant information), with a briefer FAQ [url=<a href=“http://sites.nationalacademies.org/pga/resdoc/pga_051962]here[/url]”>http://sites.nationalacademies.org/pga/resdoc/pga_051962]here](https://grants.nih.gov/training/research_doctorates.pdf)). They used 21 characteristics that were provided by faculty at research institutions as important - a full listing starts on page 65 of the manual, and includes things like number of publications per faculty member, receipt of extramural support per researcher, number of portable fellowships held by students, time to degree and placement of students after graduation.
Philosophical Gourmet Report ranks programs primarily on the criterion of faculty quality (information [url=<a href=“http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/reportdesc.asp%5Dhere%5B/url”>http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/reportdesc.asp]here[/url]. Evaluators were selected and were given a list of faculty in a number of departments to rate on a scale of 0 to 5. Each program was rated by multiple evaluators, and their scores were averaged. The actual evaluators are listed at the link above.
You’ll notice that programs rated at the top are pretty similar - Michigan, NYU, Rutgers, and Princeton are in the top 5 on both rankings, and Yale, Harvard, Pittsburgh, MIT, Stanford, UCLA, and Berkeley rank highly on both lists (among others). Also, Leiter - the author of the Philosophical Gourmet - urges readers not to pay too much attention to the exact ranking but rather look at the means and medians, because rankings can actually obscure small differences (e.g., Harvard may be four places “above” Columbia but they are separated by 0.2 points - negligible). Similarly, the NRC rankings give you a range to show there’s varying precision in their rankings and encourage readers not to view it as absolute rankings. That puts it in even more perspective; the idea is to look at general groupings of programs rather than absolute rankings.
NYU isn’t on the NRC Rankings in Philosophy I’m looking at, is there a newer one?