Ranking the Concentrations
The Near East and East Asia couldn’t be farther apart—at least according to Fifteen Minutes’ first annual rankings of Harvard’s 40 undergraduate concentrations. Near Eastern Languages and Civilization was the top-ranked concentration while East Asian Studies came in last.
The formula for the rankings is based on 16 criteria in six main categories: advising, teaching, classes, honors, social events and retention rate. FM has assembled quantitative information on concentrations from the Dean of the College, the Registrar, the CUE Guide, Courses of Instruction and the Handbook for Students in one place for the first time. Some of the data—compiled from questionnaires FM sent to the offices of all 40 concentrations—has never before been publicly released.
The goal of the rankings is simple: To provide students with as much information as possible in evaluating concentrations. FM only used numerical, quantitative data in order to ensure that the rankings are as objective and fair as possible.
We don’t expect any first-years to choose their concentration based solely on these rankings, nor do we think that anyone should. Obviously a budding scientist will not choose Slavic Languages and Literatures merely because it is second in our rankings, but the rankings may help an aspiring political scientist decide between Social Studies (ranked 21st) and Government (ranked 36th). As with the CUE Guide, students can also pick and choose what criteria they care most about. Concerned most with tutorial size? You can focus on that part of the rankings. Interested in a concentration’s teachers? The rankings allow you to hone in on students’ evaluations of professors.
Twenty-five percent of a concentration’s ranking is based on advising, the best indication of a student’s relationship to his or her concentration for which numerical data is available. Every senior in the Class of 2001 filled out a survey rating three aspects of his or her advising, and each of these three questions accounts for 6 percent of the overall ranking. The concentration’s student-to-adviser ratio makes up 7 percent of the overall ranking.
Another 25 percent of the ranking is based on teaching: 5 percent for the percentage of faculty on leave (a concentration is rewarded for having more of its professors teaching, rather than on leave), 5 percent for the percentage of faculty who are tenured, 7.5 percent for the student-to-faculty ratio and 7.5 percent for the average CUE Guide teacher ranking for classes taught by a professor listed as a faculty member of the department or committee.
The next 25 percent is based on classes: 8 percent for average size of the sophomore tutorial (rewarding smaller tutorials), 8 percent for average size of the junior tutorial (again, rewarding smaller tutorials) and 9 percent for the average CUE Guide rating for concentration courses.
Fifteen percent of the ranking is based on honors: 5 percent for percentage of concentrators who graduate with any Latin honors, 5 percent for percentage of those who graduate magna and summa and 5 percent for percentage of those who graduate summa. Our assumption is that a higher percentage of honors indicates greater academic achievement and rigor in the concentration.
Finally, 5 percent of the ranking is based on the number of social events held annually by the concentration, and 5 percent is based on the retention rate, calculated as the percentage of first-years who declared themselves concentrators divided by the number of concentrators who actually graduated three years later.
Obviously, the ranking of concentrations is far from perfect. First, many pieces of data were unavailable for this ranking, though the formula does not penalize any concentration for missing data. Second, FM’s ranking, like any ranking, is to some extent arbitrary in the weighting of its criteria. Although we weighted each category based on what we considered to be its importance and accuracy in judging the quality of each concentration, there are definitely other ways to rank concentrations. In fact, we’re interested in any suggestions readers would have to improve next year’s rankings: Please e-mail fm@thecrimson.com.
Despite these caveats, FM believes that the 2002 ranking of the concentrations will be a helpful guide to those charting the future of their Harvard academic careers. Last year, the Undergraduate Council urged the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE) to form a guide to concentrations, but the administration has yet to act. As former council president Paul A. Gusmorino ’02 says, “I’d be delighted to find out, five years from now, that there’s a Faculty-sponsored guide to concentrations that was encouraged by this effort.” Until the Faculty steps up, FM is picking up the slack.