If you’re looking at doctorate programs, one of your research tools should be the ranking by the National Research Council, or NRC. College lists list the rankings provided by the NRC are great tools for students to learn more about the schools they are considering, though it is important to remember that these rankings provide just one piece of the puzzle. Your final decision should be based on more than just one organization’s list of the top programs.

Who is the NRC?

The NRC is one of the four organizations that make up the United States National Academies. It was first organized in 1916 to help encourage the development of technologies used to fight World War I. Today, the organization is not involved in the military and is instead run jointly by the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine.

Why should you trust the NRC?

Many consider the NRC rankings to be the best rankings of doctorate programs available. Data collection for this report is extensive, and the last report was released in 1995. In 2006, the NRC began collecting data to update their rankings. There are about 200 programs participating in this ranking system for the next list release.

What is their Methodology?

Because there is some much time between the released reports, the NRC has been able to update and perfect their methodology for each list. For their current rankings, they asked a number of PhD faculty members to list the characteristics they believed to be most important in a successful doctorate program.

In order to rate each program, five questionnaires were sent out:

• Institutional (for institutional statistics and a list of their available programs)
• Program (for statistical information about each program)
• Faculty (to learn about education, work history, publications, and more about each faculty member)
• Student (to learn about the educational background, research opportunities, program practices, and future goals of each student)
• Rating (sent to select faculty members who agreed to rank other programs in their field)

Overall, all of this data is divided into three categories:

• Research Activity
• Student Support and Outcomes
• Diversity of the Academic Environment

In each category, specific data (such as publications by professors or employment of students after graduation) was weighted according to how important faculty members thought the characteristics to be in a successful program, as was studied in the initial survey by the NRC.

The NRC reports typically don’t “rank” colleges from first to last like you’ll find with traditional college lists. They instead provide an overall look at each program, along with a rating, rather than a relative rank. Others, however, have analyzed the data in the past to come up with more traditional lists of the top schools rated by the NRC.