Editorial: Important rankings

Tomorrow, U.S. News and World Report will release its annual rankings of graduate and professional schools, and, as usual, administrators across the University will decry the rankings as unhelpful and inaccurate and will deny that they pay any attention to what the rankings are, since they focus on improving the quality of the schools, not on improving the schools' rankings. In fact, however, the rankings are the single best tool that students have to help them make their choices about which graduate and professional school to attend, and, despite their protests to the contrary, University officials surely place a great deal of stock in these rankings.

The primary example of the degree to which Duke administrations care about these rankings came last year, when the School of Law fell out of the top-10 and was ranked 12th. The fact that Duke was no longer a "top-10 school" led to an outpouring a student concern and a letter from the law school's dean, Katharine Bartlett, seeking to allay student fears. Hopefully, students will remain calm when the new rankings come out, regardless of whether Duke ranks 10th or 12th.

Minuscule differences like that between the supposed 10th best law school and the 12th best school are simply not important and should not cause concern among either students of administrators. Still, it is disingenuous for administrators to claim that rankings do not matter.

In fact, the U.S. News rankings for law and other graduate and professional schools incorporate numerous important measures of a school's quality including its reputation among leaders in its field, its student faculty ratio, its selectivity, and its success at job or residency placement. Obviously, all of these factors contribute to a school's quality. Particularly important are the reputation scores, which, since these numbers come from those people in the best position to understand the schools, probably give the most accurate picture of a school's quality.

The main way in which rankings help students is to give them a general picture of which tiers schools fall into. For example, with medical schools, the rankings help students divide the schools into the top-tier of Harvard University and the Johns Hopkins University and the second-tier of Duke, Washington University at St. Louis and the University of Pennsylvania. With law schools, the rankings break schools down into the top-three of Harvard, Yale University and Stanford University, the next three of Columbia University, the University of Chicago and New York University and then the rest. Although it would be foolish to base one's choice of school solely on the rankings, it would be equally foolish for students to ignore the rankings altogether because they are one helpful metric to guide student choices. Of course, once the rankings have broken the schools into comparable tiers, then comes the time for an applicant to make intimate, personal decisions about what type of environment they feel most comfortable in.

Thus, although Duke administrators should not be working to improve Duke's rankings for the sake of the rankings, they should be working to improve those factors underlying the rankings. Duke should aim to improve the reputation of its various graduate and professional schools, make them more selective, reduce student to faculty ratios, and improve after-graduation prospects. If the University does these things - and administrators are surely trying to do so - and develops better programs, then Duke's rankings will improve.