This year's U.S. News & World Report's graduate school rankings suggest that the University's programs have stabilized; few graduate school officials are surprised by the plateau in the newsmagazine's evaluation of Duke.
Earlier this month, U.S. News released its ratings. Although the School of Law and the Fuqua School of Business remained in the top tier-at eighth and ninth places, respectively-the University's engineering and general sciences programs did not fare as well.
Fuqua was the only school to increase its rank-from 10th place last year. Many top-10 business schools traded positions this year, with Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Business jumping from sixth to second place, and Columbia Business School dropping from third to seventh.
U.S. News also singled out specialty niches within whole graduate schools; Fuqua's general management, marketing and executive M.B.A. programs received high ratings, placing eighth, sixth and fourth.
Joel Huber, associate dean of Fuqua's M.B.A. program, said that a top-10 ranking is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve. "The sense of the whole business school arena is that everyone must do a much better job just to stay even," Huber said. "The game is much tougher and more demanding than it ever was."
Although the law school did not place in any specialty fields, its eighth-place listing remained the same. Few shifts took place in the top-10 law schools category.
"It takes a very great deal of effort, and perhaps even some luck, to increase your rank and reputation from the second group of five to the top group of five in the top-10 list," said law school Dean Pamela Gann, noting that Duke is significantly smaller than its upper-tier peers. "Generally, smaller law schools are less likely to specialize in any particular area of law, but are mostly focused on providing a broad education opportunity."
Conversely, the University's graduate program in engineering was rated a comparatively low 33rd, but the biomedical engineering specialty placed fourth.
Roger Barr, director of graduate studies for the BME department, noted possible reasons for the discrepancy between the places of the engineering department as a whole and the BME category: First, he said, Duke's BME department was specifically created to emphasize graduate and research programs, whereas other engineering departments were originally geared toward undergraduate education. Second, there are significantly fewer BME programs in the country than there are civil, mechanical or electrical engineering programs.
Barr also pointed to the BME department's links to the medical school as one of the program's strengths. Still, he said, although his department is pleased with the analysis, it takes the rankings "with a grain of salt."
"We think in terms of real students, real courses, real programs," he said. The rankings are "not the focus of our day-to-day attention," he added.
U.S. News also ranked a category called "Biological Sciences." Because Duke has no broad graduate program in biology, it was rated 12th as a conglomeration of all the individual departments under the biological sciences umbrella. The pharmacology and neurosciences departments were singled out as outstanding specialties, placing fourth and fifth, respectively.
Aside from the business, law and medical school rankings, U.S. News only provided new evaluations of science and engineering departments; other graduate departments retained their rankings from 1997 or 1998. Among other newly reviewed doctoral programs was the mathematics department, which, as a whole, was rated 25th. The general physics department went unranked, although the nuclear physics specialty placed 10th.
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