|
By Matthew Winston
mwinston@uga.edu
UGA’s College of Education, Terry College of Business and School of Law are listed among  the nation’s top graduate schools in the latest rankings from U.S. News and World Report. The new rankings appear in the 2001 edition of the magazine’s “Best Graduate Schools” guidebook, now available on newsstands.
The College of Education ranks 26th among 187 graduate programs and is the only school in the state of Georgia to appear on the list. Only two other public institutions in the Southeast--the University of Virginia and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill--rank ahead of UGA.
“We’re pleased that the College of Education is again ranked among the top tier of graduate programs,” says Dean Louis Castenell. “And we are especially pleased that three of our programs are ranked among the top five in the country. This recognition is a tribute to the quality and hard work of our faculty. We are a college committed to excellence, and it is rewarding when your peers across the nation recognize you for your achievement of excellence.”
U.S. News ranked five UGA education programs among the top 10 in the nation. Georgia’s secondary teacher education, counseling/personnel services and vocational/technical programs were each ranked fourth. Both the elementary education program and the curriculum/instruction program ranked seventh.
U.S. News used 14 factors to determine this year’s rankings of graduate education programs. Among those were academic reputation, student selectivity, faculty resources and research activity.
The M.B.A. program in the Terry College of Business ranks 48th out of the nation’s 325 accredited graduate business programs. Only three public institutions in the Southeast rank higher. The business school rankings were based on a weighted average of eight measures, including reputation, placement success and student selectivity.
Dean P. George Benson also points to the Terry College’s GMAT scores as a measurable sign of the M.B.A. program’s academic quality. “Among public universities, our average score of 650 on the Graduate Management Admission Test easily places us in the top 10 nationally,” he says. “We take pride in the talented students we’re attracting, and the value they add to the classroom.”
In the magazine article accompanying the rankings, U.S. News spotlighted the Terry College and its two-year-old customized M.B.A. program for management consultants who work for PricewaterhouseCoopers. Their consultants typically travel on business four or five days per week, and a traditional part-time or executive M.B.A. program doesn’t fit the consultants’ ever-changing schedules. U.S. News notes that students in the two-year PricewaterhouseCoopers M.B.A. program “log an initial two weeks at the Athens, Ga., campus and then return there for only four weekends a year. The rest of the coursework is handled by computer-based communication.”
“That works just perfectly--I took a finance exam on a plane trip to Europe,” said Roy Greco, a 33-year-old PricewaterhouseCoopers consultant based in Philadelphia. The article also quotes Don Burkhard, director of the company’s Learning and Professional Development Center and an alumnus of the Terry College.
The School of Law at UGA was ranked 29th, tied with the College of William and Mary and Washington University-St. Louis. The survey places the UGA law school in the top 17 percent of the nation’s 174 ABA-accredited law schools, among the top 11 public law schools in the country, and among the top four public law schools in the Southeast.
“This is exciting news for us,” says David Shipley, law school dean. “Students, faculty, staff and alumni worked hard to recruit an outstanding first-year class; our placement success for the class of 1999 was excellent; and more and more of our graduates are being hired for prestigious federal clerkships. Moreover, the faculty’s publication record is strong and getting stronger, and many have presented talks and papers around the nation and overseas during the past year. In my opinion, these developments are critical to our success as we strive to build our reputation as one of the nation’s finest public law schools.”
As it has done for many years, the UGA law school earned high marks in the factual categories of placement (96 percent of graduates in the class of 1998 employed nine months after graduation); bar passage (88.3 percent in Georgia); and student selectivity (median LSAT score of 161 and median GPA of 3.55). In several instances, these scores were better than those of schools that ranked higher in the overall survey.
|
|
