Media Contacts: Kim McDonald (858) 534-7572, Denine Hagen, Engineering (858) 534-2920

Graduate programs and professional schools at the University of California, San Diego have been ranked among the nation’s best in a survey released today by U.S. News & World Report.

The rankings appear in the magazine’s 2001 "America’s Best Graduate Schools" issue and guidebook, dated April 10, and will be available on newsstands on April 3. The survey results also will appear on-line at www.usnews.com.

The Irwin and Joan Jacobs School of Engineering at UCSD was ranked 9^th among public universities and second, behind UC Berkeley, in the University of California system. In the overall national rankings, the Jacobs school continued its rapid rise, coming in 15^th from 20^th last year. The school’s Department of Bioengineering, meanwhile, ranked 3^rd in the nation this year after Johns Hopkins University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This year’s remarkable jump in the overall survey marks the sixth straight year that the engineering school has risen in the rankings and has made the school by far the fastest rising institution in the rankings among the nation’s top 20 engineering schools. In 1995, the magazine ranked the school 43^rd in the nation and, in 1996, 29^th.

"The ranking clearly reflects the extraordinary quality of our people and our programs both in the school and on the UCSD campus," said Robert W. Conn, who has served as dean of the engineering school since 1994. "We are delighted and proud. It is stunning news for both San Diego and the state, because the ranking will help us to continue to attract the very best faculty and students to the region."

UCSD’s School of Medicine continues to be ranked among the top 25 medical schools in the nation, coming in at 23^rd in this year’s survey. The medical school’s drug and alcohol abuse program tied with UCLA for 7^th place this year, up from 10^th place last year, and its AIDS program was ranked 8^th in the nation, the same as last year.

The university’s Department of Theatre and Dance came in 3^rd in the nation and its film program ranked 12^th. Within the Division of Social Sciences, the Department of Political Science was ranked 10th in the nation. Specialty programs within the discipline that also received top 10 rankings included American politics, 9^th; comparative politics, 5^th; and international politics, 8^th. Other high-ranking departments and specialty programs within the social sciences included psychology, 12^th; experimental psychology, 9^th; Latin American history, 10^th; sociology of culture, 7^th; and economics, 14^th.

In the sciences, UCSD ranked 17^th in the biological sciences, 9^th in biochemistry and molecular biology, 8^th in cell and developmental biology, and 10^th in the neurosciences. Geology programs were ranked 11^th; geophysics, 6^th; mathematics, 17^th; and computer science, 25^th. Physics at UCSD ranked 18^th in the nation, while programs in two subfields of physics, condensed-matter physics and nonlinear dynamics, were ranked 10^th and 7^th, respectively.

U.S. News & World Report’s rankings of graduate schools and programs are based on surveys among deans and faculty members in specific fields who judged each institution’s reputation, surveys from professionals in the field outside of academe, and objective criteria, such as research activity, faculty resources and an institution’s student selectivity. The magazine’s rankings in the sciences were determined from a survey conducted in 1998; in the humanities and social sciences, from a 1997 survey; and in the arts, from a 1996 survey.

In a comprehensive survey released in 1995 by the prestigious National Research Council, UCSD was ranked 10^th in the nation for the quality of its faculty and graduate programs. The NRC study, which is considered by academics to be the most definitive survey of its kind, ranked the faculty quality of 14 graduate programs at UCSD in the top 10 in their fields.