BME and EnvE rank high nationwide
Last September, the National Research Council (NRC) released its newest assessment of research doctorate programs in the United States. The 2010 report followed the widely cited 1982 and 1995 NRC rankings, which were designed to help universities improve the quality of their programs through benchmarking and to provide prospective students with accessible information on doctoral programs nationwide. While Yale Engineering’s rankings were strong overall, biomedical engineering and environmental engineering—the school’s newest departments—ranked in the top 10.
Unlike earlier NRC rankings, the 2010 report provides a series of ranges for two ranking methodologies—survey-based rankings (S rankings) and regression-based rankings (R rankings), also considered reputation-based rankings, for each program. Each ranking method is based on 20 characteristics—falling into the categories of research activity, student support and outcomes, and diversity—determined as factors that contribute most to program quality. While the methodologies are complex and interpretation is far from straightforward, in the simplest terms, the S rankings are based on the importance faculty in each field assigned to the 20 characteristics, while the R rankings are based indirectly on surveys of faculty members’ opinions of specific programs in their field. The R ranking reflects the discrepancies between what characteristics faculty members identified as important (basis for S rankings) and what characteristics they actually give weight to (perhaps unconsciously) when ranking a program. The NRC regards each method as equally valid and, in general, good agreement is found between the two methods. Discrepancies do exist, however, as is evident with Yale’s environmental engineering program, which received an R ranking of 23–91 and S ranking of 1–2, which correlates with its top rank (#1) for research activity.
Perhaps most notable for Yale Engineering in the 2010 report was biomedical engineering’s S ranking of 2–11 and R ranking of 8–20. Not only does this place Yale’s Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) near the top, but near the top based on its standing in 2005–06 when the data was collected, only seven years after Yale began to offer BME as a degree program and two years after BME became a department. All in all, the rankings are in line with the school’s newly implemented strategic vision, which has raised the status of environmental engineering from program to department and continues to strengthen BME with new faculty hires.
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