Wednesday, June 24, 2009

SPEA is Number 3

U.S. News & World Reports has my department here at SPEA, Public Finance and Budgeting, ranked at #3 in the country for 2008. Congrats to my more senior colleagues for their great work.

Here's the Top-10:
1 Syracuse University
Syracuse, NY
2 University of Georgia
Athens, GA
3 Indiana University--Bloomington
Bloomington, IN
4 University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY
5 Georgia State University
Atlanta, GA
6 New York University
New York, NY
7 SUNY--Albany
Albany, NY

University of Connecticut
West Hartford, CT
9 University of Nebraska--Omaha
Omaha, NE
10 Harvard University
Cambridge, MA

6 comments:

Suzie said...

Here is a question that one my classmates brought up:
If SPEA is number one, why are we advertising? If our school is high quality, then why do we need to have radio commercials? What are we signaling by advertising? And why are we advertising locally? We are beating Harvard according to the News and World Report and I am pretty sure they are not wasting their cash on radio promotion.

Suzie said...

Correction: I got a little carried away, we are not number one (yet) so edit that with 'SPEA is number three'...

Justin M Ross said...

Because nobody here I've talked to believes those rankings are really worth squat.

The faculty here all see Harvard Kennedy School as #1, their #10 ranking be damned. Syracuse and Georgia are seen as tough competitors with us, depending on the subject.

Why they advertize the way they do/don't is not clear to me.

Will Luther said...

I worked with two SPEA students last summer and it seemed to me that they were very focused on local and state politics. If this can be generalized to the whole class and is in fact what SPEA specializes in, advertising local might make sense. By getting students who already know quite a bit about the policy debates taking place in Indiana, SPEA is able to skip the basics and jump to the frontier of the discussion.

Or, it could be something entirely different. haha

Suzie said...

http://www.indiana.edu/~spea/career_services/employment_data/Graduate%20Employment%20Data.shtml

Here are our statistics of where past masters graduates end up. I will try to find information on our demographics to see where the majority of our students come from.

It looks like only 19% stay in Indiana and 20% stay in the Midwest. So, less than half that report back to career services stay in the region, while 31% end up in D.C. Likewise under 23% work in state and local government while between 25-39% work in federal government depending on the year.

Also our nonprofit degree is number one in the nation according to the same report. So many of our students pursue that sector, which could lead them anywhere in the world or nation.

http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-public-affairs-schools/nonprofit-management

Suzie said...

"SPEA has a diverse student body, including students from more than 28* states and more than 11 foreign countries, including Brazil, China, Costa Rica, India, Japan, Nepal, Pakistan, South Korea, Taiwan, Tibet and Turkey."

http://www.indiana.edu/~spea/prospective_students/masters/student_life/Diversity%20Initiative.shtml

This is the information that they gave me when I asked the graduate program office about student demographics. Not as informative as I would have liked, but it illustrates the point that sense SPEA is proud of our broad student population.

So, maybe the radio station owes us a favor? You would think though if anyone knows about SPEA, it is the local community.