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U.S. NEWS AND WORLD REPORT RANKS UGA GRADUATE PROGRAMS AMONG THE NATION'S BEST

ATHENS, Ga. — When U.S. News and World Report releases the 2001 edition of their Best Graduate Schools guidebook on April 3, graduate programs at the University of Georgia College of Education, Terry College of Business, School of Law, School of Social Work and College of Veterinary Medicine each appear among the nation's top graduate schools.

The College of Education ranks 26th among187 graduate programs and is the only school in the state of Georgia to appear on the list. Only two other public institutions in the Southeast — The University of Virginia and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill — rank ahead of UGA.

"We're pleased that the College of Education is again ranked among the top tier of graduate programs," said Dean Louis Castenell. "And we are especially pleased that three of our programs are ranked among the Top 5 in the country. This recognition is a tribute to the quality and hard work of our faculty. We are a college committed to excellence and it is rewarding when your peers across the nation recognize you for your achievement of excellence."

U.S. News ranked a total of five UGA education programs among the top 10 in the nation. Georgia's secondary teacher education, counseling/personnel services and vocational/technical programs were each ranked fourth. Both the elementary education program and the curriculum/instruction program ranked seventh.

U.S. News used 14 factors to determine this year's rankings of graduate education programs. Among those were academic reputation, student selectivity, faculty resources and research activity.

The MBA program in the Terry College of Business ranks 48th out of the nation's 325 accredited graduate business programs. Only three other public institutions in the Southeast rank higher. The business school rankings were based on a weighted average of eight measures, including reputation, placement success and student selectivity.

Dean P. George Benson also pointed to the Terry College's GMAT scores as a measurable sign of the MBA program's academic quality. "Among public universities, our average score of 650 on the Graduate Management Admission Test easily places us in the top 10 nationally," he said. "We take pride in the talented students we're attracting, and the value they add to the classroom."

In the magazine article accompanying the rankings, U.S. News spotlighted the Terry College and its two-year-old customized MBA program for management consultants who work for PricewaterhouseCoopers. Their consultants typically travel on business four or five days per week, and a traditional part-time or executive MBA program doesn't fit the consultants' ever-changing schedules. U.S. News notes that students in the two-year PricewaterhouseCoopers MBA program "log an initial two weeks at the Athens, Ga., campus and then return there for only four weekends a year. The rest of the coursework is handled by computer-based communication."

"That works just perfectly – I took a finance exam on a plane trip to Europe," said Roy Greco, a 33-year-old PricewaterhouseCoopers consultant based in Philadelphia. The article also quotes Don Burkhard, director of the company's Learning and Professional Development Center and an alumnus of the Terry College.

The School of Law at UGA was ranked 29th, tied with the College of William and Mary and Washington University-St. Louis. The survey places the UGA law school in the top 17 percent of the nation's 174 ABA-accredited law schools, among the top 11 public law schools in the country, and among the top four public law schools in the Southeast.

"This is exciting news for us," said David Shipley, law school dean. "Students, faculty, staff and alumni worked hard to recruit an outstanding first-year class; our placement success for the class of 1999 was excellent; and more and more of our graduates are being hired for prestigious federal clerkships. Moreover, the faculty's publication record is strong and getting stronger, and many have presented talks and papers around the nation and overseas during the last year. In my opinion, these developments are critical to our success as we strive to build our reputation as one of the nation's finest public law schools."

As it has done for many years, the UGA law school earned high marks in the factual categories of placement (96 percent of graduates in the class of 1998 employed nine months after graduation); bar passage (88.3 percent in Georgia); and student selectivity (median LSAT score of 161 and median GPA of 3.55). In several instances, these scores were better than those of schools that ranked higher in the overall survey.

"While we don't place too much stock in any one ranking, the university has enjoyed a pattern over recent years of increasingly high placements in a wide variety of such lists," said Michael F. Adams, president of the University of Georgia. "Such accolades do reinforce and increase the public's knowledge of the excellence of our faculty and academic offerings."

Graduate programs in the university's School of Social Work were ranked 39th,with UGA being the only Georgia school to make the list. The College of Veterinary medicine ranked ninth in the nation, tied with Florida. North Carolina State University is the only Southeast school to appear higher than UGA.

U.S. News first ranked graduate schools in 1987 and has done so annually since 1990. This year's guidebook, Best Graduate Schools 2001 edition, and the magazine's April 10 issue, which contains a few select rankings, will hit newsstands on Monday, April 3. All articles and rankings also will be available on the U.S. News Online Web site at www.usnews.com.

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