“This is a good day for Michigan State,” MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon said Tuesday during her testimony at the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Higher Education, commenting on MSU’s 2014 graduate school rankings from U.S. News and World Report released Tuesday.
In the publication’s annual report on the Best Graduate Schools in the nation, MSU’s College of Education received a No. 1 spot in both elementary and secondary education and placed in the No. 15 spot overall for the Best Education Schoolcategory. In addition, MSU’s nuclear physics program took the No. 1 spot in its category for the fourth year in a row.
According to the U.S. News and World Report website, the rankings are created to help students across the globe compare graduate schools based on information from academic experts about program excellence and other data that evaluates the quality of a school’s faculty, research and students.
Within the ranking system, students also can compare test scores, job placement rates, tuition per year and total enrollment within a specific college.
“This really reflects the mission of Michigan State from its founding, which provided world-class education, good enough for the proudest and open to the poorest,” Simon said after finding out MSU’s ranking.
Donald Heller, dean of the College of Education, said he was happy to see the college place No. 1 in elementary and secondary education for the 19th straight year.
“It makes everyone involved with the department happy to see validation,” Heller said. “We have always done well because we have an overall strong reputation.”
Heller said the expertise of the faculty is something that helps students excel in research and earn their doctoral degrees.
“Our faculty helps our students create research products that we show nationally and internationally,” Heller said. “The quality of our doctoral students reflects on this college. We are always trying to set a higher standard.”
Artemisia Spyrou, assistant professor of physics in the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory at MSU, said MSU ranked No. 1 in nuclear physics because of its facilities and the large amount of collaboration between faculty and students.
“Within experiments, there is a lot of encouragement of collaboration between groups and faculty, and the graduate students become very close and they help each other out,” Spyrou said. “Students are involved with every step of any experiment, (whether) that be setting up the program, conducting the research and even writing the thesis.”
Stefan Fletcher, president of the Council of Graduate Students, is not surprised by how well MSU did in overall rankings.
“We constantly score highly,” Fletcher said. “It is important that we have the resources and the support to continue to recruit and retain that level.”
Staff writer Simon Schuster contributed to this report.
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