The US News and World Report rankings of graduate programs are out. In addition to ranking schools by strength in fields overall, they also rank specialty areas such as programming languages. (No permalink.) Let’s take a look:
1 Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA2 University of California–Berkeley
Berkeley, CA3 Stanford University
Stanford, CA4 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA5 Cornell University
Ithaca, NY6 Princeton University
Princeton, NJUniversity of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, IL8 University of Texas–Austin
Austin, TX9 Rice University
Houston, TX10 University of Wisconsin–Madison
Madison, WI
This list seems pretty much random. I’m glad to see my school on top, but the rest of the list is so strange that I can’t honestly take much satisfaction from it. The University of Pennsylvania, which has one of the strongest groups in PL, doesn’t make the list at all!
Are all the US News rankings this bad? Probably, yes. One of the principles I’ve learned is when the media is wrong about anything of which I have direct knowledge, it’s probably wrong about everything else as well.
BONUS: Glenn Reynolds has some related thoughts about law school rankings.
