When U.S. News and World Report releases its list of the nation's best colleges and universities each year, prospective students are not the only readers paying attention.
The Pratt School of Engineering-which fell from 22nd to 25th for the 2007 school year-has taken the numbers into consideration in its current strategic plan.
The plan explicitly aims to place Pratt's undergraduate and graduate programs among the top 15 schools in the nation in the next five years. Despite this goal, Pratt administrators questioned how much emphasis should be placed on climbing to the top of the ranks.
"It's a bit of a Catch-22," said Tod Laursen, Pratt's senior associate dean for education. "Like any other school, we take rankings on the one hand with a certain skepticism, but at the same time realize they're very important."
Although rankings are not the only necessary criteria for judging the quality of a university, undergraduate and graduate students consider the numbers when selecting which institution to attend, said Pratt's Associate Dean of Research Robert Clark.
"A university is defined by the quality of students we attract," Clark said. "We want to do everything possible to attract the top students globally."
Provost Peter Lange has repeatedly said, however, that rankings are not a valuable tool for assessing a school's caliber.
"It's not a metric I would put a great deal of emphasis on," Lange said. "I don't believe those rankings are really reflective of the qualities and issues we're looking for."
Clark and Laursen also emphasized that the numbers offered by U.S. News may not adequately represent Pratt because some of the ranking criteria-particularly for graduate schools-give an unfair advantage to larger colleges and universities.
Although graduate school rankings are heavily influenced by numerical factors like the annual number of Ph.D. recipients and the amount of research funding, undergraduate rankings are much more reputation-based, Laursen said.
He noted that within departments, Pratt's undergraduate rankings tend to exceed the graduate school counterparts by approximately 10 spots.
"The undergraduate rankings don't exist in isolation from the graduate ones-they definitely influence each other, particularly with regard to reputation," Laursen said. "We definitely have a reputation for doing things well."
Laursen said drawing attention to Pratt's distinctive strengths-such as interdisciplinarity-will attract high-profile faculty, one of the strategic plan's primary initiatives.
Other goals include improving infrastructure to increase research opportunities, enriching the undergraduate curriculum and expanding the size of the graduate program, and Laursen noted that accomplishing such goals should raise Pratt's rankings regardless of explicit intention.
"You do these things because you think they're right, and if you do the right things, the rankings will follow," Laursen said.
Clark added that Pratt will focus on making progress in areas that would warrant improvement regardless of U.S. News criteria-such as increasing the percentage of faculty who merit membership in the National Academy of Engineers.
"It's an objective you would set independent of U.S. News and World Report," Clark said. "We can't focus on that and shouldn't focus on that-that would be inconsistent with the level of educational experience we want to offer."
Meg Bourdillon contributed to this story.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.