A Research Replication: The Reputations of American Professional Schools

Abstract

part of our research program on organizational structures, we published in this magazine the names of the top five professional schools in each of seventeen professional fields (see America's Leading Professional Schools, November 1973). data were based on the collective judgment of the deans in each of these fields of study who responded to questionnaires sent to them by the Comparative Organization Research Program at Columbia University. The data, as published, received a great deal of attention, which continues to this day. National media quoted the Change article, and it has been widely discussed at conferences. As we expected, not all of this reaction was favorable. Indeed, some of it turned out to be highly critical of our inquiry, and we felt professionally compelled to review our research and replicate part of it with a wider data base. The major criticism of our work focused on several points that deserve reviewing here. One group of critics categorically oppose ranking schools. Such rankings, they think, engender invidious comparisons and hurt many good schools that may not be at the very top in their field, particularly in a period when it is difficult to obtain much-needed financial resources. But this view sees the results of such rankings only from the standpoint of schools and their administrators and not from the perspective of their publics, especially prospective students and employees, who have a stake in knowing how schools compare in quality and reputation. Educators themselves expressed great interest as consumers in the rankings we published. After all, professional schools do differ in quality, and these differences concern people becoming affiliated with them. We think that providing information about such differences is a public service. A second criticism of our work was that it did not furnish information on the quality of professional schools, since the rankings were based on the judgment of deans and not on objective measures of quality. As one critic put it, These are just the opinions of a bunch of deans. Ideally, one ought to measure the quality of a professional school, of course, by its achievementsthe caliber of its alumni and its contributions to the advancement of