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Dear friends of the college,

Coinciding with back-to-school preparations and, some say, a slow period in the magazine-publishing business, August is a month when many rankings of colleges and universities are published. University leaders across the country typically question the methodology of any particular ranking, perhaps especially the much-noticed rankings done by U.S. News and World Report, and they may say that such rankings aren’t meaningful or important, but rankings are news because the curious mind can’t help but be at least somewhat interested in where one’s own institution is placed.

In the U.S. News and World Report rankings, Penn State consistently has placed among the top 50 national universities and among the top 15 or so public universities. This year was no different, with Penn State tied for 47th place among all universities, tied for 13th among public universities, and ranked 5th among Big Ten universities (following Northwestern, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois). As components of its overall ranking, Penn State consistently has been ranked more highly in two categories that are indicators of program and faculty quality: peer assessment and graduation and retention rate —and much lower in the quantity of faculty resources (144th), so one could conclude that we do more with less.

A ranking that was well-received in Happy Valley is the second one published by The Washington Monthly magazine, which has been described as a political, inside-the-beltway publication. The Washington Monthly ranking attempts to quantify which universities are best for the United States based on measures of performance that indicate whether a university is an engine of social mobility, fosters scientific and humanistic research, and promotes an ethic of service to the country. In the 2006 ranking, Penn State is third in the nation behind MIT and UC Berkeley. Generally, the major public universities, as a group, do better on the Washington Monthly rankings than on the U.S. News ranking. The Big Ten universities are all in the top 75, ranging from Penn State at #3 to Minnesota at #67.

Perhaps the attributes emphasized by the Washington Monthly rankings should get more attention. As the editors say, if universities tried to increase their standings in these rankings, “They’d enroll more low-income students and try to make sure they graduated. They’d encourage their students to join the military or the Peace Corps. And they’d produce more scientists and engineers. In short, our country would grow more democratic, equitable, and prosperous.”

A ranking of the top 100 global universities was developed by Newsweek and published on the Web. The ranking “takes into account openness and diversity, as well as distinction in research.” The rankings were based on measures used by Jiaotong University in Shanghai and The Times of London Higher Education Survey, plus library holdings. The measures used by Jaiotong University and The Times include the number of highly-cited researchers, the number of articles published in Nature and Science, the number of articles listed in the ISI Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities indices, citations per faculty member, the percentage of international faculty, the percentage of international students, and the ratio of faculty to students. In this ranking, the top ten included eight universities in the United States, led by Harvard, plus Cambridge and Oxford in the United Kingdom. Penn State is ranked 40th, which places it 26th among U.S. universities on the list, 11th among U.S. public universities, and 5th among Big Ten universities.

Penn State gets several high rankings in The Princeton Review, but not in the categories that go into the rankings I’ve already described. The Princeton Review rankings include 2nd on the party-school and jock-school lists, 5th on the everyone-plays-intramural-sports list, 13th on the best-student-newspaper list, and several others. Perhaps these rankings, in combination with the academically-focused rankings from the other sources, speak to the breadth of activities and the quality of life at Penn State.

Finally, to complete this ranking extravaganza, I include a recent ranking for which the methodology is robust and the implications are pretty straightforward. Each year the National Science Foundation collects data about research and development expenditures from all U.S. universities. In the most recent report (for fiscal year 2004), Penn State ranks 9th overall and 7th among public universities. In areas of particular interest to the Eberly College of Science, our ranking is 9th in the physical sciences (including 5th in chemistry, 11th in astronomy, and 12th in physics), 10th in the mathematical sciences, and 48th in the life sciences—an area where we’ve made great progress, but still have a ways to go.

In total, these rankings have a lot to say about the great impact of all the efforts of the students, faculty, and staff of this wonderful university and this remarkable college of ours.

Sincerely,