Oops! Sorry Portland.

U.S. News' major grad school rankings mixup
MediaLife Magazine

Portland State University may have a decent electrical engineering graduate program, but it’s not as good as U.S. News & World Report said it was in its “America's Best Graduate Schools 2008” rankings guidebook last week.

The magazine placed PSU at No. 9 and the University of Texas at Arlington No. 10, accidentally omitting Carnegie Mellon University, the real No. 9, and true No. 10 University of Texas at Austin.

U.S. News says the error occurred through a glitch in its computer sequencing, which turned out to be off by one starting with colleges beginning with the letter P. The mistake was brought to the magazine’s attention last Friday, in time to fix it for the magazine version of the rankings, which were changed online over last weekend.

The involved schools were notified of the error by Monday, though a bit too late for Portland State. Believing it had been ranked in the top 10, the school issued a press release saying the ranking illustrates how state investments in higher education can increase programmatic capacity, according to Inside Higher Education. When it discovered the ranking was made in error, PSU sent an email to its press list, advising them to ignore the earlier release.

This is the latest controversy to hit the U.S. News college guidebook, following a snafu last month in which Sarah Lawrence alleged the magazine was going to use incorrect SAT scores to calculate its rank.