Who's Best at What?

The endless contention over strengths and weaknesses in the nation's universities now has some systematic facts and figures to go on. This week the American Council on Education published the most exhaustive assessment yet made of graduate education in the U.S. All of the expected prestige names turn up at the top, but the study is nonetheless full of fascinating comparisons and subtle superiorities.

The report confines itself to rating the graduate departments in 29 academic disciplines at the 106 universities that turn out the most graduate degrees. Yet its author, Allan Cartter, a vice president of the council, former graduate dean at Duke University, and newly named chancellor of New York University, believes that there is "a lot of carryover" between a strong graduate program and the corresponding undergraduate program at the same school. The report is certain to be taken as a guide to where a student can get a good education in his field.

Best Balanced: Berkeley. Cartter makes only one sweeping conclusion: based on the quality of its graduate faculty, he rates the University of California at Berkeley as "the best balanced distinguished university in the country." The lead stems from an average of individual discipline ratings in five broad fields, and even though Berkeley ranks second to Harvard in humanities, social sciences, biological sciences and physical sciences, Harvard falls critically short in engineering. In the "effectiveness" of graduate programs (see table), the two schools are closer: Harvard rates first in nine of the 29 disciplines, Berkeley in seven; yet 20 of Berkeley's departments rate among the top three, to 19 of Harvard's. In overall balance, Cartter's tabulations suggest that the Stanford faculty ranks third.

There are some surprises in the full list of departmental ratings. Arizona's little-known anthropology faculty ranks high (twelfth), ahead of Minnesota and Washington; Pittsburgh's philosophy faculty ranks eighth, ahead of Chicago and Stanford; Delaware's chemical-engineering program ranks fifth, ahead of M.I.T. and Caltech. Yet no university in the South or Rocky Mountain states has even one "distinguished" department; the Southwest and Plains states have only two: Texas in German and Minnesota in chemical engineering.

By Scholarly Vote. The ratings come from responses to more than 4,000 questionnaires sent to department chairmen at the 106 universities, plus distinguished senior scholars on their faculty and knowledgeable junior scholars who got their graduate degrees less than ten years ago. Each rated the schools on the quality of their graduate faculty in his own field ("distinguished," "strong," "good," "adequate," "marginal," etc.) and--more significantly--on "the effectiveness of the doctoral program" as measured by how he would regard these schools if he were to take his own doctoral work there today ("extremely attractive," "attractive," "acceptable," etc.). A respondent was allowed to indicate that he did not know enough about a school to make a judgment, but the quantity of communication within disciplines--at professional meetings, through publication, and in the "slave markets" where teachers are hired--keeps most of the specialists well informed.

The council report finds that the two types of ratings tended to place the same schools near the top, although not always in the same order; the scholars rated the Berkeley faculty tops in physics, for example, but would prefer to take a physics doctorate at Princeton, presumably because they would be able to work more closely with the faculty of the smaller school.

The study was financed by the council, the U.S. Office of Education, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Cartter concedes that any such assessment of quality involves "someone's subjective judgment." He does not agree, however, with one respondent's complaint, quoting Dr. Samuel Johnson, that "a compendium of gossip is still gossip." The council considers the ratings valid enough that, even if the arguments over this study are still raging in 1970, it plans to do it all over again to see just how rapidly reputations shift.

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