U.S. News & World Report recently published its rankings of America’s Best Graduate Schools 2005, and Stanford once again occupied a top position in most of the major categories.

Stanford’s School of Education was listed as number one together with Harvard. Both Stanford’s Graduate School of Business (GSB) and School of Engineering were ranked number two following Harvard and MIT. Stanford Law School has rated number three after Yale and Harvard, and the School of Medicine placed eighht nationwide.

According to U.S. News & World Report, these rankings are based on two types of data: expert opinion about program quality and statistical indicators that measure the quality of a school’s faculty, research, and students.

“Our ranking methodology differs from category to category,” said Richard Folkers, director of media relations at U.S. News & World Report. “Basically we combine subjective data — mostly surveys with academics and recruiters etc. — together with objective data, which frequently are test scores, acceptance rate, students’ starting salaries and so forth.”

As for the indicator and opinion data, U.S. News & World Report said they come from surveys of more than 1,000 programs and nearly 9,100 academics and other professionals conducted in fall 2003.

Dean of the School of Education Deborah Stipek said she was very pleased with this year’s rank of the school and was particularly happy because the school is consistently rated by other scholars in the field as the top school in the country.

Stipek also mentioned that the rankings were not perfect by any means, and they did not capture many important qualities of education programs, such as individualized attention.

Stipek’s response was echoed by Jim Plummer, dean of the school of engineering, which has been ranked number two for the past few years.

“I am delighted as the school’s excellence is being recognized,” Plummer said. “This ranking is one datum that gets a lot of national attention and we certainly pay attention to it.”

He added, “I am not surprised that we are number two, as the size of the school is counted as an important factor. However, we don’t want to be as big as MIT, which is twice as big as us, and we do not want to be a technical institution. We are glad to be within Stanford — a great liberal arts university.”

Nevertheless, some of the deans question the ranking’s quality and accuracy.

Philip Pizzo, dean of the medical school directly pointed out in his newsletter on April 5 that “the methodology employed by U.S. News & World Report is skewed to evaluate size over quality.”

Pizzo suggested in his letter that if funding per investigator had been employed in their ranking of medical schools as is done in engineering schools, Stanford would almost certainly be in the top five — more accurately reflecting its overall quality.

As for the GSB, Stanford has in the recent years competed for the top spot with Harvard.

“We have mixed feelings about the rankings,” said Robert Joss, dean of the GSB. “We don’t think rankings are the best way to characterize or evaluate the relative approaches of different schools.”

The measures the U.S. News & World Report use do not always capture the individual character of each institution, he added, and what is most important is the fit between students and schools, not the rank order.

Stanford’s GSB remains the most selective of all the business schools, with the lowest acceptance rate of 9.2 percent. Entering students have the highest student scores of any ranked business school and the highest average annual salary ($107,000) upon graduation.

“The rankings are certainly not perfect,” Folkers said. “However we try to be as accurate and transparent as possible, specifying out our methodology.”

He added, “The rankings are important but far from the only tool to choose schools. The most important thing is to find the best fit for students.”

Folkers emphasized that magazine ranked schools for the benefits of students and they were not trying to create a horse-race.