relationship between department rank and college rank in engineering graduate program rankings conducted by U.S. News and World Report, The

Journal of Engineering Education, Jan 2003 by Vojak, Bruce A, Price, Raymond L, Carnahan, James V

The colleges ranked #4 (Cal Tech), #7 (Cornell), and #8 (Carnegie Mellon) are enclosed within the ellipse labeled "B" and are positioned below the group A colleges in Figure 3. The #9-ranked college (Georgia Tech) seems to be on the borderline between groups A and B, with the limits of its confidence bounds residing near each group. Each of these colleges in group B has an average "reputation" rank in the top ten but with relatively few departmental appearances in the top-five lists.

Finally, there are a number of colleges that have some top-five departmental appearances, but whose average "reputation" ranking is not in the top ten. These colleges are identified within the ellipse labeled "C" in Figure 3 (including Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Minnesota, Penn State, Washington, Texas A&M and California-San Diego).

The identity of the colleges in groups A and B does not reveal a reason why the college ranking would be inconsistent with the frequency of top-five departmental ranking. One might consider a hypothesis that the colleges in group B have extraordinary departments that appear in the top-five lists, and thus compensate for the relatively low number of top-five department appearances. This is not supported by the facts: the three colleges of group B have yielded only three first-ranked departments over the thirteen-year period for which the rankings have been conducted, not an indication of extreme strength. Also, the statistical difference between the frequencies of appearances in the top-five departmental lists of the group B colleges and group A colleges is striking; even the high ends of the confidence intervals for the three group B colleges fall at or below the 20 percent frequency of top-five departmental rankings.

A second hypothesis for the differences between the two groups could involve a special accounting for colleges that do not have departments in all disciplines. If, for example, a college was lacking an agricultural engineering department or had an industrial engineering department embedded in a larger unit (e.g., in mechanical engineering), it might be concluded that the reduced opportunity of making the top-five department list could account for the discrepancy between college and department ranking. The difficulties encountered by comparing this hypothesis with the data are four-fold.

First, the frequency of appearance of the group B colleges in the top-five department lists is typically a factor of four or more lower than that of the comparably ranked group A colleges. However, the three colleges of group B have comparable numbers of programs available for ranking as top-ranked MIT (based on a review of these school's web sites, of the thirteen possible ranked programs, MIT has 10, Cal Tech has 9, Cornell has 11, and Carnegie Mellon has 8). Second, since this study of rankings is based on perceptions, the survey participants can accommodate variations in the exact organizational relationship between units in making their judgments. Third, the point made was earlier that the three colleges of group B have yielded only three first-ranked departments over the thirteenyear period for which the rankings have been conducted-not an indication of extreme strength. As such, for colleges with some missing departments, one would expect their other overwhelmingly dominant departments to appear as first-ranked on a regular basis if they were to contribute so significantly to the college rank Finally, in one sense, it could prove an advantage to have a fewer number of departments, since the focus of resources can be more concentrated, creating increased potential for top ranking.