Dartmouth's Amos Tuck School of Business dropped a spot to tenth in the 2004 U.S. News and World Report's America's Best Grad Schools. Dartmouth's other graduate schools, the Thayer School of Engineering and the Dartmouth Medical School, received rankings of 44th and 26th respectively.
Tuck received the number one ranking by a similar report issued by the Wall Street Journal last year, and was ranked fourth by Forbes magazine the last time it released rankings.
"The rankings can be important, in that any ranking is providing some perception of what the external market thinks of the school," Tuck Associate Dean James Danko said. "Tuck is a top quality institution; we are pretty confident in what we do."
The rankings are based on surveys filled out by schools and corporate recruiters in November. In the business rankings, 25 percent of a school's composite score was derived from a subjective ranking on a scale of one to five given by peer institutions. Another 15 percent of the composite is derived from rankings by corporate recruiters. These two factors combined contribute to 40 percent of the overall score and are called the quality assessment.
Another 35 percent of the composite score is based on placement success. This category takes into consideration mean starting salary and bonus and employment rates for 2002 graduates.
The final 25 percent of the composite business score is derived from student selectivity and takes into account GMAT scores, average undergraduate GPA and acceptance rate.
Tuck's composite score of 84 ranked it behind Harvard, Stanford, University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, Columbia University, Duke University, University of California at Berkeley and University of Chicago, in that order. Last year Stanford topped the list.
Commenting on the one spot drop from last year Danko noted that the peer score and GPA had stayed the same, while the recruiter and GMAT scores had actually gone up. The one factor that saw a substantial decline was the percentage of graduates employed three months after graduation, which at 75.6 percent was the lowest in the top 12 schools.
"I know that hurt us," Danko said, "But it lets us know that is an area we want to work on, not to improve our ranking, but just to be better. It was an honest number."
Tuck Director of Admissions Kristine Laca said that the rankings rarely have an adverse effect on the school, but that they do sometimes change the type of students that apply.
"Most people who have done their research and are interested in a school which has a close-knit community are going to be led to Tuck," Laca said. "There are always others, however, who are going to be led to Tuck based on certain rankings. We just continue to focus on what we do well. The important thing is that each student does research and really looks at what things are important to them."
