Rankings

Rochester Earns New Recognition

Rochester is on something of a rankings roll as a prominent international survey and a major news weekly identified the University as among the best.

In October, the Times of London ranked Rochester as the 48th best university in the world. The University moved up from 73rd last year, placing 21st among U.S. universities.

And last summer, Newsweek selected Rochester as one of 25 schools named a “New Ivy” in its 2007 Kaplan/Newsweek How to Get into College Guide.

The elite list, produced for the first time, includes institutions whose first-rate academic programs and top students rival traditional Ivy League schools. The rankings are based on admissions statistics as well as interviews with administrators, students, faculty, and alumni.

“The University consistently and strongly competes among the nation’s and the world’s leading research universities,” President Joel Seligman notes. “The new rankings recognize our increasingly strong programs, our great faculty, and our wonderful students.”

The two rankings are among several examples of Rochester’s placement on prominent lists and surveys. The University also placed 21st on Washington Monthly’s ranking of how well schools are “benefiting the country.” Criteria for the survey include how colleges contribute to social mobility by helping the poor to improve their economic standing as well as institutional support for research in the humanities and in the sciences. The ranking also considers institutional promotion of an ethic of service to the country.

And separately, the Simon School was ranked 28th among the nation’s top 30 graduate business schools by Business Week magazine in its “Best Business Schools of 2006” ranking this October.

For the Times of London list, editors surveyed 3,703 academics worldwide, who were asked to identify up to 30 universities that excelled in research within their own fields of expertise. The approach makes the rankings topical and also liable to change from year to year if institutions do not maintain research standards, the editors note.

Jonathan Burdick, dean of admissions and financial aid in the College, says such national and international recognition is welcome and deserves celebration, but he points out that rankings, like any other comparison, tend to oversimplify.

“While rises in rank do create some more media attention and maybe even ‘buzz’ for the University among prospective undergraduates and their families, it’s the substance of the learning students can do here that matters most,” he says. “Word-of-mouth from successful students and graduates matters much more to us in the long run.

“For a long time Rochester’s substance has outweighed our ‘buzz,’ so it’s valuable for outlets such as Newsweek and the Times of London to catch up with the reality.”