<p>The US News rankings are useless if you didn’t know it already. They send questionnaires to department chairs of any school that has more than 5 degrees awarded and ask them to rate the programs. The response rate is typically in 20s to 30s. Most department chairs who have better things to do don’t bother filling out the survey. Do you really think that the chair of biology at Louisiana State University is in a good position to decide whether Harvard or Stanford has a better biology program? Ask any smart biology graduate student, and the chances are you will be told that Harvard is better regarded. Stanford has a top program in biology that is perhaps comparable to Harvard’s in quality but not by the sheer breadth and the incredible concentration of resources and researchers. See one of my posts above about the importance of size in graduate programs. Of course, you will do fine anywhere if you find your dream lab and are successful in producing high-quality research, but your chances of finding the dream lab are increased many-fold at Harvard where you have hundreds of top labs to choose from instead of dozens. </p>
<p>Harvard is also generally ranked #1 in physics by objective measures such as the number of publications and citation impact factors (see one of PosterX’s links above), although Stanford is regarded so highly that I would agree that the differences are very marginal here. </p>
<p>In terms of the Law School, Stanford and Yale have class size that is 1/3 of Harvard. The U.S. News uses criteria that puts large programs at a severe disadvantage such as the amount of money spent per student, student-faculty ratio, and acceptance rate. What is arguably much more important is the quality of instruction and how the graduates perform after graduation and here Harvard is undisputably the most successful and influential law school in America. 12% of the entire U.S. Senate is composed of graduates of a single law school, Harvard. Looking at the composition of the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Appeals Court, the U.S. Attorney General’s Office, the district attorney’s offices nationwide, and the top law firms in the U.S., Harvard Law graduates are the dominant force. Yale does do a better job of churning out academics on a per capita basis, but since Harvard’s class size is 3 times as big, in absolute numbers, Harvard still produces more academics and many more real world lawyers than these schools. </p>
<p>In Engineering, it’s the exact opposite situation because here Harvard’s program is only a tiny fraction of the programs at MIT or Stanford. Harvard’s program has a lower acceptance rate, higher scores and grades, and higher expenditure per student, etc. Harvard’s engineering faculty have higher citation impact factors (see one of posterX’s links above) and higher percentage in the National Academy than MIT. However, it’s resources and breadth are limited, which is why it is not a top program.</p>
<p>What doesn’t make sense is then why doesn’t the U.S. News give extra points to the Harvard engineering benfit from being a small but high quality program? Here the criteria are different. It’s not the expenditure per student, but expenditure per faculty. There is also a criteria of the number of degrees awarded, which penalizes Harvard (notice that a similar criteria introduced for Law School would obviously help Harvard a great deal). </p>
<p>The bottom line is that the criteria used by the U.S. News are quite arbitrary and do not necessarily reflect what is important. It’s not an absolute assessment of quality or even perception by peers (since the response rate is low). The U.S. News staff uses it mainly to sell their magazine and they tinker with the criteria a little bit every now and then while making sure that the results come out something similar to what people might expect (since otherwise their survey will be discredited). I think you are foolish to make anything out of the U.S. News survey results, including the college rankings. I would rely more on data that are based on objective measures (e.g. publications, research funding, honors and prizes, success of graduates), even if they can be limited. Based on such measures, Stanford is pretty close to Harvard but still a bit behind overall, except in engineering. But Harvard is upgrading its engineering department to a full school and is supposed to be doubling its engineering faculty (it will still be less than half the size of Stanford’s but close to Caltech) so I would expect the gap to narrow in the years to come.</p>