Ranking

Motivation

An academic unit's ranking can be important for attracting undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. There are a variety of mechanisms for assessing reputation and/or ranking. The much maligned US News and World Report rankings are nevertheless the go-to guide for parents and high school students, and so a unit's ranking there will have a significant impact on whether students decide to attend UH or go to a mainland school.

Rollup

This widget can provide a visualization of the academic unit's ranking for a given academic year from one or more sources. Forbes has an article from September 2020: Comparing The Major College Ranking Systems: How Methodology Matters, which can help an academic unit decide which ranking is most useful to them.

Some disciplines may have their own ranking site. For example, in computer science, csrankings.org provides more fine-grained rankings: you can see rankings for different subdisciplines (AI, Databases, Theory, etc.)

Drilldown

I am not aware of a useful drilldown for this measure.

Baseline

In many cases, the absolute value of a ranking is difficult to interpret without reference to the rankings of peer departments. Therefore, when the department dashboard is configured with a set of peer institution departments, this widget can show how this department's ranking compares to its peers.