Abstract
In an article published by The New Yorker in February, Malcolm Gladwell rips apart college rankings for their subjective, and even arbitrary, criteria. "Who comes out on top," he concludes, "is really about who is doing the ranking." Gladwell would surely be thrilled by the National Research Council's assessment of U.S. doctoral programs, published last September, which acknowledges the uncertainty of its results in the very way it presents them. Instead of ranking the programs No. 1, 2, 3, and so on, it merely puts each one within a range. For example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's electrical and computer engineering program falls somewhere between 6th and 18th place among the 50 such programs the report considers. "What this tells people is that it's not an exact science and that there is a great deal of variability built into the process," says James Voytuk, a senior program officer at the NRC.
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