NEWS IN BRIEF: Rice graduate rankings

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U.S. News and World Report recently released its annual America's Best Graduate Schools rankings in a book. Several of Rice's graduate departments placed high in the rankings.

The School of Architecture placed sixth for the Master of Architecture program, beating out the University of Texas at Austin, which ranked ninth. The architecture school was the highest ranked graduate program at Rice.

"Architecture is truly a source of pride because it's probably the smallest of all the graduate schools of architecture," President Malcolm Gillis said.

The Shepherd School of Music tied for 25th with both Michigan State University and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. UT was 16th.

"Shepherd is very rapidly moving up. By the time this year's freshman class graduates, I think you'll see Shepherd in the top 15," Gillis said.

For graduate Geology departments, Rice again tied for 25th. Alongside Rice were Northwestern University, State University of New York at Stony Brook and the University of California at Davis.

UT tied for ninth with six other schools, including Yale University, University of California at Los Angeles and Princeton University.

Gillis commended the Computer Science and Geology departments because he said they were much smaller than other comparably ranked schools.

For general engineering rankings, Rice placed 26th, while UT and Texas A&M University placed 11th and 17th, respectively.

The Computer Science Department fared better. It placed 16th, along with Harvard University, while UT placed ninth.

"Even though it's small, our engineering school is highly ranked and climbing," Gillis said. He cautioned against taking the magazine's rankings too seriously, though.

"These are magazine rankings. The academic world does not take these rankings as seriously as they they take the National Research Council rankings," Gillis said.

This item appeared in the News section of the March 22, 1996 issue.

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