National Research Council Rankings

As a Carnegie Doctoral/Research Extensive University, ensuring the quality of graduate programs is an important aspect of Iowa State University’s mission. Assessment of research/doctoral programs by credible groups such as the National Research Council (NRC) provides valuable feedback for quality improvement.

Several rankings of university graduate programs are available, including those published annually by U.S. News and World Report, or the NRC assessment report, which is published about every 10 years. The NRC rankings represent a major effort by the national research community to identify the strengths and weaknesses of important doctoral programs throughout the country.

The 1993 NRC study ranked programs in 41 disciplines in the arts and humanities, biological sciences, engineering, physical sciences and mathematics, and social and behavioral sciences. A total of 3,634 doctorate-granting programs in 274 private and public universities were eligible to participate in the study. The scholarly quality of program faculty (denoted 93Q) was the principal measure used for ranking doctorate-granting programs across the U.S. A second measure, the effectiveness in educating scholars (denoted 93E), was highly correlated with the 93Q measure. For all programs, the correlation between the 93Q and the educational measure was larger than 0.90. Finally, a third measure used for ranking programs, called the change in program quality in the past five years, was denoted 93C . In addition to the high correlation between the 93Q and the 93E, the 93Q measure was also found to be highly correlated with some program characteristics including total number of faculty, proportion of faculty with federal research funding, number of publications per program faculty, number of citations per program faculty, and reported number of Ph.D. graduates

The following table contains the 1993 NRC rankings of eligible ISU graduate programs. Under the heading 93Q we indicate the rank order of each program.

a. Ranking according to scholarly quality of program faculty
b. Number of programs ranked
c. (Q93/n)*100
d. FY94 ISU tenure/tenure track faculty in program if it coincides with an ISU department
e. FY94ISU FTE faculty in program if it coincides with an ISU department

Two Iowa State graduate programs, Chemistry and Statistics & Biostatistics, were ranked in the top 25th percentile. Another nine graduate programs–Physics, Economics, Cell & Developmental Biology, Chemical Engineering, Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Psychology, and Ecology, Evolution & Behavior–were ranked in the top 50th percentile.

The next NRC study of research/doctoral programs was planned for 2003, is now scheduled for summer of 2006. It will include additional disciplines, many of which will highlight some of Iowa State’s best programs in the agricultural and engineering sciences.