U.S. News and World Report released its 2018 best graduate schools ranking, in which Emory’s part-time Master of Business Administration (MBA) program at the Goizueta Business School jumped 10 spots from last year’s rankings to 15th in the nation. The Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing also increased its position in the rankings to No. 3, while other medical and other professional programs maintained their spots in the top 25.
Chief Data Strategist at U.S. News and World Report Robert Morse attributed the Goizueta part-time MBA program’s jump to a change in methodology for ranking such programs.
“We increased the weight of the GPA and GMAT score, so that helped Emory,” Morse said.
Goizueta Business School Dean Erika James also credited the improvement to strong test scores.
“Rankings aren’t just influenced by your own improvements, but changes in competitors,” James wrote in a March 27 email via Goizueta Senior Communications Manager J. Michael Moore. “We reported a 25-point increase in average GMAT score in the program. That, along with a strong peer-ranking, likely helped us move up the chart.”
While James said she is “very happy” about the rankings, she noted that rankings are not all-encompassing when it comes to judging a school’s performance.
“Our administration is careful not to live or die by the rankings,” James wrote. “We want to be consistent, and we want to see how we compare on various measures. Ultimately, that helps guide our strategic direction and complete the mission of providing the best education possible to our students.”
Goizueta’s full-time MBA program tied for 20th in the nation, with its executive MBA program ranking 23rd.
The 2019 edition of U.S. News and World Report’s “Best Graduate Schools” also released rankings for Emory’s nursing, law and medicine schools and programs.
The Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing ranked third in the country, up from fourth place last year. The Doctor of Nursing Practice program ranked fifth; the Family Nurse Practitioner program ranked seventh; the Adult-Gerontology Acute Care Nurse Practitioner program ranked ninth and the Adult-Gerontology Primary Care Nurse Practitioner program ranked 14th. Emory ranked 11th for schools with the best nursing administration programs.
Emory School of Law held the same position as last year, tying for 22nd in the nation.
Some of the factors that are taken into account when ranking law schools include faculty resources, bar exam passage rates, size of the library, career outcomes and LSAT scores, according to Morse.
The School of Medicine remained ranked 23rd for research but moved to 37th for primary care, a decrease from last year’s 34th place ranking.
The Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, a joint effort between Emory School of Medicine and the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Engineering, tied for second with the University of California, San Diego in schools with the best biomedical engineering programs, up from third in last year’s ranking.
