This essay explores and examines how rankings and league tables have played (and continue to play) a major and consequential role in how contemporary business schools manage their affairs. It introduces and advances the proposition that rankings promote the short-term manipulation of public reputation (image) projected by business schools at the…

Conventional wisdom suggests that a field of striving compels US public master's institutions (PMIs) to pursue prestige in the academic hierarchy. We posit that, due to their unique histories of democratizing college opportunity, PMIs face conflicting imperatives from two fields: an origin one of equity and another of striving. Our hypotheses are…

The article discusses the history of the formation of the system of awarding degrees in Russia. It analyzes the reasons for the devaluation of academic degrees in contemporary Russia, and it reveals the ways to improve researcher training in graduate school. Possible models for integrating the Russian system of researcher training into an open…

With the move toward mass higher education in Russia, academic degrees have lost much of their prestige. It is now necessary to look more closely at the reasons for this devaluation, to explore ways to optimize the training of researchers in graduate school programs, and to integrate Russia's system of science training into the European system.…

The emergence of a research university model in Canada has increased significantly over the past few decades. From institutions that focused primarily on education, universities are striving to become large, research-focused centres. These changes have brought increased prestige to universities, greater graduate education, and more funding…

This paper explores the relationship between tuition fees charged by MBA programmes and the number of applications to these programmes, using a panel dataset comprising universities from countries across the world. Using Three-Stage-Least-Squares methods for simultaneous equations, we find a two-way relationship between tuition fees and…

A common theme within the literature on higher education is the congested nature of the graduate labour market. Researchers have highlighted the lengths to which many students now go, in response to this congestion, to "distinguish themselves" from other graduates: paying increased attention to university status; engaging in a range of…

This article aims to demystify some of the realities of graduate education for the next generation of professors in the humanities and social sciences. Its "tell it like it is" orientation is designed to ensure that graduate students have a firm understanding of the institution they are entering, and will hopefully help them avoid any number of…

Using a conceptual model, this study examines the variables associated with the "U.S. News and World Report" peer assessment ratings of graduate and professional schools in business, education, engineering, law, and medicine. What are the correlates of prestige among the nation's leading graduate and professional schools, and are they consistent…

Reasons school psychology students choose to pursue a specialist or a doctoral degree were examined. A survey was mailed to 350 school psychology students whose names were provided by the National Association of School Psychologists. Survey items were subjected to a principal components analysis and scores from the resulting 10 scales were…

To assess the reputations of 81 doctoral training programs in special education, the department heads and junior and senior faculty members of the programs were asked to identify the five programs with the most distinguished faculties and the five programs that graduate the best prepared students. (Author/DB)

Graduate training in sociology involves more than meeting organizationally imposed demands such as satisfying departmental requirements, taking exams, and completing a dissertation. More central is the development of identity through institutional and interactional forces. We examine the experience of graduate students as tied to the social…

Refutes the claim that top-rated programs in library science tend to maintain and enhance their reputation by hiring their own and each other's graduates and that this pattern of inbreeding was likely to be harmful to the field. Concludes convincing evidence was not provided and the true situation may be other than claimed. (PEN)

While department and program quality rankings could be based on such factors as how well the faculty teach, advise students, and perform service roles, in practice most rankings measuring achievement in graduate departments have been based on faculty research performance of various kinds. (Author/MSE)

Comparative data are gathered on (1) the institutional and nontransferrable fellow awards and (2) individual and portable awards of the Danforth Fellowship program. Results indicate that students attending elite universities will overwhelm their competitors in a national competition that is academically oriented and that open competition does not…