Relationship Between U.S. News and World Report's and the National Research Council's Ratings/Rankings of Psychology Departments

Every year, U.S. News and World Report (USNEWS) creates a stir among academics and the public by publishing its ranking of universities and various departments within those universities. Although members of the public rely on the USNEWS rankings when making their academic choices, psychologists and other academics tend to rely on the National Research Council (NRC) report to differentiate various academic departments. Given the concerns about the scientific merit of the USNEWS rankings, the authors gathered some empirical information about the correlates of the USNEWS department ratings/rankings. They address the following questions in this comment: How similar are the ratings/rankings from USNEWS and the NRC? Are the USNEWS and NRC ratings/rankings related to other indices of department quality? Finally, what do these correlations say about the utility of these two rating systems? The authors believe that this comparison provides an initial exploration of the meaningfulness of two resources that are heavily relied on by the public and academia. The authors found that although they expected a positive correlation between the NRC and USNEWS rankings, they did not expect the magnitude of the relationship to be so substantial. Further, both of these measures exhibited significant and substantial relationships with two other NRC criteria of department effectiveness and several weaker but clearly nontrivial relationships with the APA graduate student data. At the very least, the present results do not support the belief of some academics that the USNEWS ratings/rankings lack scientific merit. Indeed, these results seem to suggest that the USNEWS rankings of psychology departments substantially duplicate the NRC rankings.