The U.S. News and World Report rankings saw UT crack the top 50 public schools in the country this year.
Up five spots from last year, UT placed No. 47 among public institutions in the publication’s 2011 undergraduate rankings and 104th among all national universities.
In particular, the College of Business Administration and the College of Engineering received praise. The College of Business Administration’s logistics program, continually critically acclaimed in academic rankings, checked in at No. 7 among public institutions and No. 9 overall. The college’s overall undergraduate business program ranked No. 34 publicly, and the College of Engineering’s undergraduate program ranked No. 37.
Jan Williams, dean of the College of Business Administration, said the logistics program has a history of this type of ranking, and he thinks the reasons for the critical acclaim begin with faculty.
“The faculty here in that area is particularly strong,” Williams said. “They develop really good curricula in consultation with people in business. It’s not just a bunch of faculty members sitting around, designing curricula. They work closely with people in business to determine what they want our graduates to have when they leave, what they want them to be able to do when they leave, and we listen to those people. That has helped us, I think, stay real current.”
This philosophy also applies to other programs within the College of Business Administration, contributing to the undergraduate business program’s overall ranking. Faculty emphasis in programs like finance, accounting, marketing and logistics, keep curricula current for students, Williams said.
In addition, he said, new curricula in international business and entrepreneurship has helped raise the college’s relevancy while also gaining the college visibility.
He said the Venture Living Learning Community for freshman business students has helped improve retention rates, keeping freshmen at UT for their sophomore year. Students live on the same floor in the same hall as other business students and take the same first-year classes as their neighbors.
“The biggest criticism of the Venture program that I’ve heard is that students do not want it to end after the freshman year,” he said. “They would like for it to continue and be a sophomore program and maybe even a junior program. Right now, it’s freshmen-only.”
The college’s five-year graduate rate sits at a robust 85 percent, he said, and student demand for business continues to be high, which led in part to the implementation of differential tuition.
Students were outnumbering faculty by a larger and larger margin, but thanks to the extra funds, Williams said this ratio would be remedied.
“We added some faculty this fall,” he said. “We’ll add more in the fall of ‘11 and even more in the fall of ‘12.”
Williams said it’s important to focus on simply improving and not target specifically improving in rankings.
“I think we (need to) just keep doing what we’re doing,” he said. “I really think it’s not a good idea to say we’re going to take steps solely to improve rankings. I think we do what we do well, and that will be reflected in the rankings.”
Wayne T. Davis, dean of the College of Engineering, said undergraduate program rankings were based solely on perception, while graduate program rankings were 40 percent perception and 60 percent qualitative data, such as number of graduate students, number of doctoral students and research funding.
It’s because of this perception-heavy evaluation that Davis thinks it’s particularly beneficial that the College of Engineering has 23,000 alumni, among them graduates that work in all 50 states and 64 countries.
“(It) makes for a lot of visibility,” he said.
No doubt the fact that the Chancellor’s Honors Program students are required to have international experience contributes to the graduates in 64 countries. Currently, the College of Engineering has about 28 percent needing that international experience, which can be work in study abroad, service projects and field trips.
“It’s a great requirement,” Davis said. “... It’s really important that we expose to students and faculty the global nature of engineering and the fact that we are really now a global society.”
The College of Engineering’s individual programs were ranked at least in the top 70 each individually, with the nuclear engineering program ranked ninth out of a pool of what Davis estimated was about 45 programs. The other programs were ranked out of about 200 other programs, he said.
“We’re just very pleased that we are a nationally ranked program, both in graduate and undergraduate, and all of our programs have a program within them that is nationally ranked,” he said.