The School of Education and Social Policy’s ranking jumped up five places in the U.S. News and World Report’s annual list of the best graduate education programs.
The school ranked sixth place, up from 11th place last year in the magazine’s annual rankings of graduate programs by sector.
Harvard’s graduate school of education ranked first, followed by the education schools at University of California at Los Angeles, Stanford University, Columbia University and Vanderbilt University. The rankings were released April 1 in “America’s Best Graduate Schools 2006.”
“It’s a great class of institutions and we belong there,” said Coleen Coleman, associate dean of the School of Education.
It is the smallest school at Northwestern with 290 undergraduates and 300 graduate students, Coleman wrote in an e-mail to
The Daily. The undergraduate school offers majors in a range of programs relating to learning and development, including human development and secondary teaching.
Master’s degrees are offered in elementary, middle and secondary school education, but it doesn’t offer doctorates in administration or special education as most education schools do. Its doctoral program offers an interdisciplinary approach to education, awarding degrees in human development and social policy and in learning sciences, a program integrating science and education.
Part of the school’s leap can be attributed to a higher peer assessment score, which determines 25 percent of the magazine ranking, Coleman said. In peer assessment evaluations deans of 249 education schools rate their fellow universities.
Other factors that determine a school’s rank include a superintendent assessment score, in which a sample of superintendents nationwide rate schools; a school’s mean Graduate Record Examination score; and the amount of faculty research. The School of Education had the highest mean GRE score of all programs. While schools have mixed feelings about the reliability of the rankings, they are important for the prestige of an institution or program.
Lacking more standardized education programs, SESP differed from many of its peer institutions. It made the application process for the rankings difficult, Coleman said.
“We had a hard time filling out the survey,” Coleman said. “We don’t have programs that conform to those categories. A lot of the boxes we had to check, ‘other.'”
Reuven Lerner, a second-year doctoral student in learning sciences, said his experience there was largely positive and is happy the school was recognized.
“The work we’re doing at SESP seems far more impressive than what is done at other schools,” Lerner said.
Reach Diana Scholl at [email protected].
