Trinity College Dublin Places High in World Rankings

Trinity College Dublin has ranked high in recent assessment of universities worldwide. It ranked 48th among universities around the world in terms of scientific research and accomplishments in a survey published by the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Most recently, Trinity placed 61st worldwide by the QS World University Rankings 2013.

Trinity is a world renowned, highly prestigious university, and IFSA-Butler offers semester and year options at Trinity in a wide range of subjects. Click here to learn more about this terrific university and study abroad opportunity.

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Trinity College Dublin Places High in World Rankings

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U.S. News Releases 2013 Best High Schools for STEM Rankings

High Tech High School in New Jersey continues its reign as the best public high school for STEM.

It's not every day that a politician, a beauty queen and a hip hop star champion the same cause, but don't tell that to President Barack Obama, reigning Miss America Mallory Hagan and Black Eyed Peas frontman Will.i.am.

All three are using their fame to promote STEM education, and it's not hard to understand why. Training in science, technology, engineering and math can place students in the pipeline for in-demand career fields such as software development, biomedicine and aerospace engineering.

Early exposure to those subjects is key to preparing high school graduates to eventually fill the millions of jobs waiting for technically skilled workers. The U.S. News 2013 Best High Schools for STEM rankings, released today, identify public high schools excelling at that task.

The rankings evaluate 500 gold medal public schools from the 2013 Best High Schools rankings, using Advanced Placement STEM test data for 2011 graduates as the benchmark. Of those schools, 250 earned a numerical rank for their STEM achievement.

[Learn more about how U.S. News calculated the STEM rankings.]

High Technology High School in New Jersey continues to outpace its peers on that front, earning the title of the Best High School for STEM for the third straight year. Students at the highly competitive school come from more than 50 school districts to immerse themselves in a curriculum rich with math, science and technology.

Students at High Tech High kick off their freshman year with courses in software applications and engineering design, take physics as sophomores and can earn college credit while studying sustainable energy at Brookdale Community College. The high school is located on Brookdale's campus, so students can easily go back and forth between the two.

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia and Troy High School in California did not ease up on their STEM focus, either. Both schools retained second and third place billing, respectively.

At Thomas Jefferson, students benefit from research labs rarely seen outside of a university setting. Job shadowing and internships at Troy help students connect the dots between classroom theory and real-world application.

[See photos of the best STEM high schools.]

Academy of Allied Health and Science made significant gains in STEM achievement, climbing from No. 135 to the No. 4 spot. The New Jersey school is one of 12 from the Garden State to break the top 100 in this year's rankings.

The Academy's swift rise illustrates the close competition between schools in the STEM rankings. A 12.4-point jump in the school's STEM index was enough to propel the school 131 places. That index, calculated by U.S. News, is based on the percentage of 2011 AP test-taking graduates who took – and passed – AP math and science exams.

Okemos High School in Michigan also improved leaps and bounds in the 2013 STEM rankings. The Chieftains jumped 73 spots to claim the No. 8 position.

Located across the street from Michigan State University's campus, Okemos is one of only two Michigan high schools to make the top 100 of the STEM rankings. The other – East Lansing High School – is just five miles up the road.

[See which top-ranked universities produce the most STEM degrees.]

California, New York and New Jersey are home to the lion's share of the Best High Schools for STEM in the country. The three states combined house nearly half of the public schools that earned a numerical rank this year. Close to 45 of the ranked STEM schools are either charter or magnet schools.

Stay up to date with the U.S. News High School Notes blog.

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New Study Rates U.S. News Business School Rankings

A recent study found that U.S. News has the most stable business school rankings, compared with the Financial Times and Businessweek.

Which business school rankings are the most reliable and valid? According to a scholarly article, it's the U.S. News & World Report Best Business Schools rankings, published as part of our Best Graduate Schools rankings.

In the article in the June 20 edition of the Journal of Marketing Education, "A Psychometric Assessment of the Businessweek, U.S. News & World Report and Financial Times Rankings of Business Schools' MBA Programs," Dawn Iacobucci examines the three major full-time MBA rankings.

This peer-reviewed article joins a rapidly expanding body of academic literature that take a scholarly, analytical approach to the study of academic rankings and their impact.

The Vanderbilt University professor favors U.S. News largely because she believes our Best Business Schools rankings have shown greater reliability over the years and have greater validity in terms of objectivity.

In an email, Iacobucci wrote, "I would look at U.S. News as a result of this research partly due to objectivity of the measures and components that go into the ranking. It would also be extremely difficult to game U.S. News. The Financial Times is pitched to favor the more international schools, and the Businessweek student poll has a good deal of variability to it. You don't want to see schools slipping up and down and all over the place. If there is that much variance, what good can there possibly be to the ranking?"

The study measured whether the salaries earned by MBA graduates were influenced by the rankings by looking at the monetary differences students earned by going to higher-ranked schools in the three different rankings.

U.S. News did significantly better on this measure. The analysis found that students who attended business schools that ranked higher in the U.S. News rankings earned larger salaries.

For each higher U.S. News rank, a school's graduates earned $908.03 more in yearly salary, on average, at their first jobs following business school for the most recent year of data.

Every rank improvement for a school in the Financial Times rankings translated to, on average, $377.58 more, and in the Businessweek rankings, $605.27 more.

The paper evaluated the consistency and reliability of the overall rankings by looking at how schools' ranks had changed over time, starting by looking at all the b-school rankings of each publisher from the time each of the three rankings were first published.

The study concluded that "comparing across media, we see that Businessweek varied quite a bit over its first 15 years or so (e.g., the formulae may have been changing, school sampling may have undergone changes, etc.), and it has become stable since approximately 2004. On this criterion, we can laud the U.S. News as yielding the most stable results, year to year, even from its inception. The Financial Times results are stable as well."

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About the Best High Schools Rankings

How to Use the Rankings

Methodology

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