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, PA 2 University of California–Berkeley Berkeley, CA 3 Stanford University Stanford, CA 4 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA 5 Cornell University Ithaca, NY 6 Princeton University Princeton, NJ University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign Urbana, IL 8 University of Texas–Austin Austin, TX 9 Rice University Houston, TX 10 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.
Internet Scofflaw 