The Relationship Between Department Rank and College Rank in Engineering Graduate Program Rankings Conducted by U.S. News and World Report

College rankings conducted by various popular magazines have generated both considerable interest and controversy. In this work, we present statistical analyses of thirteen years of U.S. News and World Report graduate program “reputation” rankings for engineering colleges and their constitutive departments, using them to reveal the relationship between department rank and college rank. Two important trends are substantiated in this study. First, we confirm statistically that some colleges with a relatively small number of top-five ranked departments place higher in the college rankings than some colleges with a significant number of top-five ranked departments. Second, we observe that college rank is much more closely related to department rank for some disciplines than others, providing additional resolution beyond our earlier work.