Ranking Art Schools

artsmarts
Sun, 29 May 2011 11:54:57 +0000

As to the credibility of US News & World Report’s rankings, you need to know HOW they rank and what their guidelines are in order to know whether these rankings are credible. From what I could gather they have increased the weight given to high school college counselors in their rankings which for art schools I would find rather questionable. I’m really not all that convinced that most high school guidance counselors are that informed about art schools and suspect that the usual suspects just keep receiving high marks without any real insightful information being given.

Generally these rankings might be accurate but I would suggest a much more in-depth look at the schools and not eliminating some that aren’t listed. If money is an issue, of course one would be wiser to pick a Pratt but because it has an established good reputation not because some “news” magazine has ranked it high.

When I started investigating US News’s criteria I certainly didn’t find anything in-depth enough to call this “the only in decent ranking system”. And while I won’t argue with a high ranking for RISD this is kind of common knowledge not some great discovery by US News.

Also the graduate school experience and graduate school structure can and often is very different from undergraduate. I would be very cautious about using graduate school rankings as guidelines for undergraduate schools.