The new U.S. News & World Report rankings for Criminology/Criminal Justice graduate school programs are out. University of Maryland holds on to its #1 ranking! It's great to be at the best school. Indulge me as I brag a little bit.Of course in briefly scanning some other CJ blogs, I noticed that everyone who's at a school that's not at the top of the list are complaining about the ranking methodology. Hey, I think U.S. News & World Report got it right. No complaints from me (ok, so I'm a little biased here). Granted there are many methods of ranking graduate school programs. Another blog site rightly points out that the Journal of Criminal Justice Education has published some good pieces ranking Criminology/CJ programs using different methodologies. The results don't substantively differ though. The same schools consistently come out on top. I can't remember if University of Maryland's program was #1 in all of the Journal of Criminal Justice Education pieces, but they were at least in the top 3.
I remember being a senior in high school and planning for where I wanted to go to college. I thought the U.S. News & World Report rankings were like the definitive source of college rankings. So maybe it's just a bit of nostalgia that I get excited about seeing my current school at the top of their list.
What do others think? Did U.S. News & World Report get it right? Who should have been ranked higher? Who should have been ranked lower? What ranking criteria do you think is most important? Should it be based on faculty publication counts? Publication counts only in prestigious journals? Faculty grants received? Peer rankings (as I believe the U.S. News & World Report rankings primarily relied on)? Service to the field (such as positions held at professional associations/societies like American Society of Criminology)? Counts of faculty citations in other publications? Or is all of this just a waste of time? Are we just massaging our collective ego's by doing these rankings? It may be difficult to obtain any high degree of objectivity in producing such rankings, but I don't tend to think that they're a waste of time. Again speaking from personal experience, I know they helped me decide on a graduate school when I was looking to get my Master's degree. I also think competition is good (stay tuned for a forthcoming posting on theory competition vs. theory integration).
2 comments:
Is this like "Power rankings" for nerds?
I always like reading your blog; it gives me something to do when I don't want to work for a minute. If the US News & World Report study is supposed to provide a measure of peoples' PERCEPTIONS of CCJ departments (and I believe this is what the methodology provides), then the rankings must be "right". If the rankings, however, are supposed to be an objective measure of which program is best, then I wonder if any ranking can ever be objectively correct because people's ideas/perceptions about what makes a department "the best" differs. For example, is it more important to publish or get grants? I think an interesting study would be to explain/predict peoples' perceptions of programs' rank based on their objective characteristics, such as publications by faculty (but don't forget students) and grant money brought in. For instance -- and holding constant publications and grant money -- do schools who have graudated more PhD students (e.g., UMaryland vs. UMSL) have a higher perceived rank because more persons from those schools participate in the US News & World Report study (once they become professors)? Maybe; maybe not. Keep bloggin...
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