Pitt now ranked in top 20

U.S. News ‘ World Report has named Pitt the 19th best public university in America. In its… U.S. News ‘ World Report has named Pitt the 19th best public university in America. In its Aug. 28 edition, Pitt was also ranked 57th among all national universities, whether public or private. Boston University and Ohio State University-Columbus were also ranked 57th.

Robert Hill, vice chancellor for Public Affairs, said that Pitt is pleased that an external source has noticed the University’s achievements.

“We don’t place a whole lot of stock in these rankings,” Hill said. “Still there are considerably good feelings here at Pitt. To be in the top 20 [public national universities] is a reasonably good placement.”

Representatives for Pitt are happy with the results of these rankings because all the universities that Pitt is typically compared to are also trying to improve. Hill noted that the steady hold on 19th among public national universities and the climb in the overall national university rankings bodes well for the work that Pitt has done.

According to U.S. News ‘ World Report, the rankings are based on several factors with varying degrees of importance. The six factors, in order of importance in this ranking system, are peer assessment, graduation and retention rates, faculty resources, student selectivity, financial resources and alumni giving.

The standards by which U.S. News ‘ World Report judges universities are not the same as those that Pitt uses to measure its achievement.

“Our efforts are more focused around improving against our own standards of what Pitt is and what it has become,” Hill said.

Some of the internal measures of progress that Pitt employs are funding for research, students’ progress in winning national honors and recognitions, and the accomplishments of alumni and faculty in terms of national and international recognition.

Newsweek International also recently published rankings for U.S. public universities and for all universities worldwide. Pitt ranked considerably higher — 10th in the United States and 37th worldwide — than it did in the U.S. News ‘ World Report rankings. This can be attributed to the fact that the publications used different criteria when ranking schools.

“Newsweek is more gratifying because it looks at quality of faculty, research publications of faculty, library size,” Hill said. “This is much more like what we look at.”

Other factors that Newsweek International considered when ranking universities included the percentage of international faculty, the percentage of international students and the faculty-to-student ratio. Pitt ranked ahead of many prominent U.S. universities in the rankings, including New York University, University of Maryland and Brown University.

While Pitt does not set goals based on published third party rankings, the University does hope to achieve excellence.

“We do have aspirations to be one of the finest and most productive universities in the world and that transcends any one ranking,” Hill said.