The Tuck School of Business was ranked ninth among business schools for the second year in a row in the U.S. News and World Report Graduate school 2016 rankings, which were released this month.
The Geisel School of Medicine was ranked 37th in research and 29th in primary care, compared to 34th in research and 18th in primary care last year, while the Thayer School of Engineering was ranked 61st for the second year in a row.
Tuck Dean Paul Danos said that the school could have placed higher, in his opinion.
Danos attributed Tuck’s ranking to it not being a “brand name,” or as much of a household name as Harvard Business School or the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Danos said that if a person were asked to name the top five graduate schools, he believes they would tend to name schools that have more well-known names.
“If you are a dean and they ask you,‘What are the five best schools that you can think of?’ if it is someone that has had some kind of a relation with Tuck, they will score us high,” he said. “[If] they’ve had no relation with Tuck, then they will fall back on the brand names that everyone knows.”
Danos said that Tuck has started to increase its public relations programs in order to promote the school’s name. He further noted that 10 years ago Tuck had only 500 mentions in the press per year, as opposed to over 3,000 currently. Additionally, the school is starting to be featured in more periodicals, such as when Danos was named business school dean of the year by Fortune magazine in 2014.
The numbers used to form the ranks are partially from the school, alumni, students and surveys, Danos said.
Danos added that the school placed as high as it did due to high rates of employment after graduation, which, as of 2014, showed that Tuck placed 98 percent of graduates in jobs three months after graduation. These numbers have consistently been in the top five among graduate schools, he said.
He further observed that high rankings tend to draw more applicants overall, along with higher levels of social media engagement and name-brand recognition of the quality of Tuck’s education, has also contributed to an increase in applicants to the school.
“The ability to research the quality schools is so much better than before, and so I think that that, over time, is helping Tuck more and more,” Danos said.
In the fall of 2014, The Economist’s rankings placed Tuck second among business schools behind University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. In these rankings Tuck was placed first both for diversity of recruiters and for student rating of alumni effectiveness.
Thayer Dean Joseph Helble said that the rankings did not accurately reflect Thayer’s quality as a school. Helble said that the U.S. News rankings do not take into account several factors that make Thayer a successful school, noting that there is a “heavy size bias,” and Thayer is one of the three smallest schools in the top 100 ranking.
He also said that the rankings do not take into account the support the school provides to undergraduates.
Helble said that he foresees the school moving up in the ranks since it will be expanding its faculty and programs. Other initiatives include increasing the size of its research portfolio and funding research and ultimately receiving more peer recognition from outside the school. He also said newly hired faculty members will continuously build out their research programs, which will serve to improve Thayer’s reputation.
The Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education was awarded to Thayer in 2014 and will also help the school’s standing, Helble said.
The entrepreneurial success of Thayer has not been acknowledged, where over one-fourth of the faculty has started a company based on work coming out of their laboratory, he added.
Director of communications and marketing for Geisel Derik Hertel wrote in an emailed statement that while Geisel was one of the smallest schools in the top 50, the school is proud of its ability to stay within those ranks, considering how rankings tend to fluctuate.
