Are rankings from previous years still valid?
Rankings from previous years contain valid information but are not necessarily comparable with rankings based on data collected and analyzed this year. For the disciplines of business, education, engineering, law and medicine, where we do extensive statistical data gathering, we constantly strive to improve our data-processing procedures to spot errors. We review our statistical surveys each year to sharpen our questions so that our indicators yield results as closely comparable as possible over all schools. There may also be trends and situations, such as the economic climate, that differ and have an impact on the data points we collect. If you are going to compare a school from year to year, we recommend that you compare the data, not necessarily the ranking of the school. This year’s rankings use the data that best reflect current conditions.
