Comparison Of US News To NRC Graduate Physics Rankings.

Ever wanted to visually compare the US News rankings of graduate schools to that of the National Research Council (NRC)?  Well, HappyQuark prepared such a visual for graduate physics programs just for you! (Thanks to Julianne at Cosmic Variance for pointing this out)

(Click to See.)

What I find interesting is the two rankings agree fairly well within the "error bars" of the NRC rankings.  I take this to mean both rankings do a reasonably consistent job and the NRC in some sense gives sensible error bars on everything.  (These are the NRC "Survey Quality" rankings for those who what to know how to reproduce this list.)

Update:  A comparison with the "Research Quality" NRC ranking is here:

Again, the two rankings seem to track well within the "errors" of the NRC rankings.

I should do the extra effort of mixing and matching different weightings for the NRC data and compare against US News, but I think the "Survey Quality" and "Research Quality" rankings are probably good enough to see the full picture.

Enjoy!