To protest what it sees as an irrelevant and arbitrary method of ranking institutions, the Thayer School of Engineering chose not to participate in this year's U.S. News and World Report survey of the nation's best graduate schools, which hit newsstands yesterday.
Thayer School Dean Elsa Garmire said her refusal to participate was "a protest" again the rankings that she says misinforms prospective graduate engineers.
Garmire said she decided not to submit the information for the U.S. News rankings this year after a meeting with the Engineering Deans' Council in Florida last spring.
According to Garmire, many of the deans at that meeting agreed not to participate in the U.S. News survey.
Until this year, Thayer had been ranked as one of the top 50 graduate engineering schools. It had ranked 47th in the nation by U.S. News since 1995 and was 43rd in 1994.
Garmire said Thayer's small size and lack of specialized engineering makes it difficult to compete with larger schools.
She said there is no way to rank "across the board" for graduate engineering schools.
For example, Thayer offers no civil engineering specialization but a great material sciences specialty, Garmire said. For an engineer, to go by the rankings is "meaningless," she said.
Garmire explained that students who attend Thayer have an interdisciplinary view rather than a specialized focus.
"The rankings really just let you know what schools are very large and have across-the-board engineering," she said.
Engineering Professor Bill Lotko said other schools simply "have a lot more breadth" than Dartmouth, a fact which creates problems with reports such as the U.S. News survey.
According to Lotko, Thayer's model for engineering does not create specific "compartments" that students had to fit into like other specialized engineering schools.
Thayer is the "only kind of school that gives an interdisciplinary engineering degree," Garmire said.
She said interdisciplinary engineering was the "way of the future" for engineers and a unique trait of Thayer.
There is no way to do an "honest ranking" between a school with specialized engineering and Dartmouth's engineering program, she said.
Garmire said the College appears to straddle an uneasy middle ground between large engineering schools, like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and California Institute of Technology, and schools with tiny engineering programs, like Yale University.
Admissions would not be affected by the decision to end consideration by U.S. News, Garmire predicted.
"If anything, it will help us," she said. "The whole idea is to make sure we're not compared unfavorably according to a series of pieces of data that are not relevant to prospective students."
Thayer has the most applicants per position of any engineering school, Garmire said.
She said the school is looking to educate "a few highly selective students."
Lotko said selectivity was not a problem at Thayer. Almost 300 applicants are screened for fewer than 50 graduate positions.
