CORRECTION APPENDED

Three of Harvard’s graduate schools ranked at the top of U.S. News and World Report’s 2007 list of “America’s Best Graduate Schools.”

This marks the fourth consecutive year that Harvard Medical School (HMS), Harvard Business School (HBS), and the Harvard Graduate School of Education (GSE) have all placed first.

Harvard Law School (HLS) fell to third place this year, behind Stanford. Yale maintained its number one position.

The top five business schools remained unchanged from last year. Behind Harvard were Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania (Wharton), MIT, and Northwestern.

Harvard Medical School placed first in research for the sixteenth time, increasing its lead over second-placed Johns Hopkins by a sizeable twenty points.

Harvard Law School’s ranking drop failed to provoke much anguish among rising Harvard 1Ls.

“I’m not particularly concerned with the rankings drop,” said Matthew C. Sullivan ’06, a resident of Leverett House who will be attending HLS in the fall. “The large size of HLS’s student body makes it hard to keep up with Yale and Stanford in numbers-based rankings, but I have always considered the size and tremendous resources of HLS to be its strongest points.” 

“Harvard’s reputation and placement record at firms and in government, more than any particular ranking system, drove my interest in HLS,” said Sullivan.

And the school's administration said it wasn't frazzled by the slip in the rankings either. "We do not believe the US News rankings are the best measure of academic quality, nor does anyone else who understands legal education," spokesman Michael Armini wrote in an e-mail. "We encourage applicants to visit Harvard Law School, learn as much as they can about what we offer, and then make an informed decision." 

Harvard Business School spokesman David Lampe, in a telephone interview with Bloomberg.com, called the rankings “more of a beauty contest” than an accurate measure of an MBA program’s quality.

Local private admissions consultant Sanford Kreisberg explained that although superficial, the U.S. News rankings accurately assess a business school’s selectivity.

“The U.S. News rankings, more so than other rankings (Business Week, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times), are a very good proxy of how hard each school is to get into—and which schools applicants will pick if admitted to both,” he said. “You can dismiss that as a ‘beauty contest,’ but employers really care about that kind of beauty.”

CORRECTION: The original and print versions of this story misidentified Michael C. Sullivan and incorrectly stated that he resided in Lowell House.