Ouch

The new U.S. News grad school rankings are out, and it's official, GW fell from 20th to 28th. That's a considerable drop.

Some of the drop results from a change in the rankings methodology -- U.S. news finally decided to count part-time students in a school's stats. That affects schools that have a large part-time program, such as GW. The other big factor appears to be a drop in our "students employed 9 months after graduation" stat, from 97.1% to 92.8%. That doesn't sound like that big a deal, but with most schools tightly bunched on that statistic, a small change can cause a big drop.

Some professors put on a show of not caring about rankings, but in fact people care a lot, and it's especially important for schools that were hanging on to the edge of the top 20 -- i.e., us. There's going to have to be a lot of soul-searching and some tough decisions around here as we figure out how to regain our traditional ranking.