If I am interested in finding out what programs at a university are especially good, how do I find out that information? Every university has areas of greater and lesser strength, but how can I tell?
(By the way, I’m interested in Northern Arizona University, in case anyone has any inside info)
Nowadays universities are reviewed on Google Earth / Maps right alongside restaurants and the like. Not that you should go only by that obviously but reading the reviews might be a place to start. If you’re seriously considering going there, nothing beats actually visiting the campus and checking out the department yourself. Take a tour and ask questions, try to meet with a faculty member or advisor if you have specific questions about the program to get a feel for it.
US News and World Report has rankings, but it looks like if you want to find rankings by the individual school (here), you have to subscribe or shell out.
What programs are you interested? I imagine that UA is ranked higher in many ways, but I wouldn’t let absolute ranking deter you. Sometimes they correlate too highly with endowment. Still, I would rather go there for the (IMO) better weather.
US News has college rankings that break down by broad fields, which can be a decent place to start. They’ll tell you if a particular school, say, has a decently ranked law school or business school. But those sorts of rankings are very vague and broadly-defined. You won’t find fine-grained breakdowns of every part of every department. And those broad rankings won’t tell you about the strengths and weaknesses within a particular program.
For instance, when I was doing some of my own researched I noticed that one particular school had a well-ranked biology graduate program. However, what the rankings neglected to mention was that particular school had a world-class agricultural science department (which was counted under bio in these rankings), but was complete rubbish in many other big areas like biomedical research.
Lots these sorts of rankings are also published in book form.
There’s really no good alternative to asking the opinions of those who know the departments you are interested in. All of the review sites IME (and I realize this is GQ, but I’ve worked or been a student at nine different universities over the past 15 years) have their own problems. US News and World Report tends to drag unrelated criteria, such as alumni donation rate*, into the rankings. A lot of the internet sites tend to collect reviews from people who have an axe to grind against their former educational institution.
But the bigger problem with the review sites is simply that they’re not asking the experts to judge whether a university is good at something or not. If I wanted to know, for example, who had the best business school, the first place I’d start would be to ask the opinions of business leaders and leading business scholars. Which, for many reasons, the review sites can’t do.
So what I would do is to start talking to a few professors in your field, and ask them what their opinion of Northern Arizona (or whatever school) is. Most professors in the US are fairly straightforward about doing so, and with any luck you’ll make a good impression on them.
*I don’t want to go on and on about fundraising data analysis, but alumni donation rate is dramatically affected by a number of factors which have little to do with a school’s success in turning out good students, or even with alumni loyalty. If a school’s alumni population is skewed heavily to younger alumni, for example, its alumni donation rate is going to be low, no matter how good its fundraising department and alumni loyalty are. Public institutions are going to generally have much lower donation rates than private institutions, schools with a lot of commuter students are going to have lower rates, etc. Why US News and World Report thinks alumni donation rates are a vital sign of the university as a whole, I don’t know; maybe it would be useful to use it as a benchmark against their peers, but they don’t do that.
I would agree with Duke if the question were “What universities are especially good for subject X,” but that does not appear to be what is being asked. The OP appears to asking “What departments/programs are the best ones at the University of Northern Arizona?”
I am having a bit of trouble in imagining why anyone outside the university (even a potential student) would want to know that (so perhaps Duke really is answering the right question), but by far the best way to find out would be the inverse of Duke’s suggestion: ask people at the university. If it is the quality of the teaching that concerns you, ask a few students; if it is the research, ask someone in the administration (but they might just give you PR bullshit) or ask a few of the professors that have been there a while (but remember that their opinions may be biased, in either direction, about their own department and those working in closely related areas).
Found a page: http://www4.nau.edu/marketing/pointsofpride.asp
I think the OP is looking for undergraduate programs, but I’ll put grad in too, especially since it may “trickle down.”
Choice quotes. Ellipses mine:
“U.S. News and World Report has ranked NAU’s undergraduate engineering program among the best in the nation for the fourth consecutive year.”
“The W.A. Franke College of Business is among 15 graduate schools nationwide that students rated most highly for its marketing preparation… putting it alongside programs at Harvard, Duke and Northwestern, among others.”
“Northern Arizona University’s master’s in business administration is listed among the most outstanding business programs in the nation…”
“In January, 2008, the Conservation Biology journal ranked NAU in the Top 40 (of over 300 universities) for research productivity in the area of conservation biology.”