Three Harvard Schools Take First in U.S. Rankings

Three of Harvard’s graduate schools sat at the top of their respective heaps in national rankings released last week.

In the annual set of graduate school rankings released by U.S. News & World Report, Harvard Business School (HBS) and the Graduate School of Education (GSE) recaptured the number one position from Stanford, while Harvard Medical School retained the top spot it has occupied for the better half of a decade.

Stanford led HBS with a lower acceptance rate—7.9 percent to HBS’s 9.7 percent—and a slightly higher employment rate at graduation.

However, 88.9 percent of HBS graduates were employed three months after graduation, as contrasted with 81.7 percent of Stanford grads, and HBS graduates averaged a starting salary that is about $700 higher than their Stanford counterparts.

In the Stanford Daily, Dan Rudolph, Stanford Business School’s senior associate dean and chief operating officer, attributed the school’s drop in ranking to Harvard to the slight differences in starting salary and to Silicon Valley’s economic woes.

James E. Aisner ’68, director of media relations and senior editor at HBS, warned against taking the rankings too seriously.

“There are differences in methods of teaching and focus of the curriculum,” he said, and prospective students “still have to do their homework to understand what the best environment is for them.”

Judith F. Montminy, a spokesperson for the Medical School, also cautioned applicants against putting too much weight in the rankings.

“Prospective medical students should consider a range of personal interest factors in choosing the school and not rely on a single survey instrument,” Montminy said, adding that it is difficult to “capture the many dimensions of medical school” in a single survey.

The GSE was ranked number one for three consecutive years before falling to Stanford last year.

“HGSE is gratified to see itself in the company of other high-quality institutions like Stanford and [the University of California at Los Angeles],” Christine Sanni, a GSE spokesperson, said in an e-mail.

The Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences ranked 17th for a second straight year, and according to Dean Venkatesh Narayanamurti, Harvard’s relatively small program suffers in such surveys because the rankings take into account absolute size.

However, the Division logged among the lowest acceptance rates, at 12.9 percent, and highest research expenditures per faculty member at over $746,000.

“We are doing extremely well for our size,” Narayanamurti said in an e-mail.

Harvard Law School remained in the third position for the fourth straight year, behind Yale and Stanford. A Law School spokesperson declined to comment.