2 UCI Doctorate Programs Rated Among the Best

Two UC Irvine postgraduate programs have been rated among the best in the nation by a long-awaited National Research Council study that also ranked four California universities among the top 10 graduate institutions in the country.

The university’s English and comparative literature program was ranked eighth and its French language and literature program 10th in the four-year, $1.2-million study widely seen in higher education as one of the best measures of academic quality.

“It’s the second bit of welcome news for us lately,” said UCI Chancellor Laurel L. Wilkening, referring to a recent issue of U.S. News & World Report that rated the Irvine school 48th nationally for its undergraduate program. “This just reflects the basic ongoing quality of what we do. It’s nice to be recognized for it.”

Judged on faculty quality, UC Berkeley is the best overall graduate institution in the nation, and three other California universities rank among the top schools.

Harvard, Yale and other venerable Eastern schools held their own, as usual, but UC Berkeley, Stanford and UC San Diego placed first, second and 10th among institutions with the highest number of doctorate programs ranked in the top 10 in their fields.

When the data was evaluated a different way, by the percentage of each school’s programs rated highest, Caltech joined that California threesome in the top 10.

The study only solidified UC Berkeley’s already sterling reputation. With 35 of its 36 graduate programs rated among the top 10 in their fields for scholarly quality, that campus was by far the country’s best-rated graduate institution across the board.

But some said Tuesday that UC San Diego was California’s real winner. Ranked No. 1 in both oceanography and neurosciences and in the top 10 overall, the ocean-view campus in La Jolla, many said, was finally getting its due.

Other California institutions did well in particular areas. Of the 274 universities evaluated, for example, UC San Francisco had the top-ranked biochemistry and molecular biology program. UCLA’s linguistics program was deemed third best, while its physiology and psychology programs both ranked fourth in the nation.

At UC Irvine on Tuesday, department heads for both celebrated programs cautioned against making too much of such rankings, which they say can often be arbitrary. Nevertheless, both were gratified by the study, a recognition of longstanding efforts to attract top faculty.

“Usually one associates excellence in the humanities with the traditional schools,” said Brook Thomas, who took over Sept. 1 as head of the English and comparative literature department. “Obviously, this is extremely gratifying.”

Both departments have a relatively small number of faculty and students. The 30-year-old French language and literature program has just seven professors and about 15 students. Similarly, the 26-year-old comparative literature program has about eight faculty members and 40 to 50 students.

The department heads said they hope the rankings will strengthen their programs’ recruiting, which competes with the nation’s finest universities.

“We have to go up against Yale, Princeton and the other prestigious Eastern schools,” said Dr. Richard Regosin, head of the French department. “It’s been harder and harder to attract the best. . . . This may well work in our favor.”

The new report updates and broadens a 1982 study by the Conference Board of Associated Research Councils, an ad hoc group consisting of the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Council on Education, the National Research Council and the Social Science Research Council.

UC Berkeley also came out on top in the 1982 study of faculty quality, followed by Stanford, Harvard and Yale, while UCLA and Princeton tied for fifth place. At the time, that news was seen by many to place UCLA among the nation’s top-ranked research universities.

The new study, composed of data collected mostly in 1993, examined more than 3,600 doctoral programs in 41 fields. Universities provided data on the students and faculty. National databases yielded detailed information about faculty research, productivity and graduates.

But the most crucial part of the study was a survey of nearly 8,000 university faculty members. Their responses to detailed questionnaires provided a peer assessment of each program’s effectiveness in training scholars and research scientists and of the overall scholarly quality of each program’s faculty.

Of all the areas scrutinized in the study, this one--referred to as the “reputational” scale--is the area that many educators believe is most meaningful. While some question how accurate such qualitative rankings can be, many institutions put a lot of stock in them. On Tuesday, the University of California was no exception.

UC President Jack W. Peltason issued a statement celebrating that more than half of the 229 UC doctoral programs evaluated were rated in the top 20 in their fields in terms of faculty quality--a record of performance that he said was unmatched by any university system in the nation.

“The study confirms what most of us have long known--that the quality of UC’s doctoral programs is truly extraordinary,” Peltason said.

What the study took pains not to confirm, however, was an overall ranking of graduate schools. The study ranked doctoral programs separately, by field, thus providing the data for detailed comparisons among schools, but intentionally did not analyze those comparisons.

“We did not consider it as a tournament where we were looking for No. 1,” said Stephen M. Stigler, a University of Chicago statistics professor and one of the 19 committee members who compiled the report.

Stigler said that other than “satisfying people’s cravings” for knowing who is on top, such rankings are largely useless for those who most need to know about graduate programs: aspiring graduate students and their parents.

“When you talk about graduate research programs, people should not be applying to a [whole] university,” he said. “They apply to a program in a university.”

But that did little to stop universities--and journalists--from making their own tallies to determine which schools had fared best. UC Berkeley faxed the media 11 pages of hastily computed rankings based on criteria such as which schools had the most programs ranked in the top 10.

By contrast, UCLA preferred to judge schools by how many of their programs ranked in the top 20--by that measure, UCLA placed third, after Stanford and UC Berkeley.

Another method involved tallying how many No. 1-ranked programs each university had. Four schools had six No. 1 programs: Harvard, Yale, Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago had five each; Caltech had three; and Princeton, UC San Diego and Columbia University each had two.

Among Southern California schools, there were other accomplishments. UC Santa Barbara’s geography program was found to be fourth-best, its materials sciences program eighth, its religion program ninth and its physics program 10th. And USC’s electrical engineering program tied for 10th place with UCLA’s.

Looking north, UC Santa Cruz’s astrophysics and astronomy program was ranked sixth in the country, and its linguistics program was 10th. UC Davis was ranked fifth for its ecology and evolutionary behavior program. And in addition to its top-rated biochemistry program, UC San Francisco was ranked seventh or above in developmental biology, genetics, neurosciences, physiology and biomedical engineering.

In addition to straight rankings, the study also included some subtleties that shed light on the relationship between reputation and excellence.

For example, in addition to ranking faculty quality, the study also ranked the overall effectiveness of each program. In most cases, as one might expect, these rankings were identical--Yale’s history program was rated No. 1 in both categories, for instance.

But there were some discrepancies. Harvard’s history program, for example, was ranked fourth in faculty quality but dropped to 12th in effectiveness.

“You may find some anomalies,” said Stigler, who explained that such a drop would appear to indicate that “there is a place with an excellent faculty but [the study’s] raters don’t feel they’re as effective in educating their students as other schools.”

Digging deeper into the data, another column of statistics reflected the views of a select subset of the study’s participants: academics who work at universities that the study deemed to be among the upper half of those rated. This group sometimes reached different conclusions than the larger whole, such as putting UCLA’s history program at fifth place instead of sixth.