'U.S. News and World' ranks
UD among America's best public universities

by Neil Thomas

The University of Delaware is counted among the nation's premiere public universities, according to rankings released Sept. 7 in U.S. News and World Report's special issue entitled "America's Best Colleges 2002."

UD ranks 24th among the top 50 public national universities, a distinction it shares with the University of Iowa and Rutgers University, and it moved up two slots from last year's ranking.

The University of California at Berkeley continues to be ranked first among the nation's public universities, a position it also held last year.

UD's Department of Chemical Engineering was ranked fifth in the nation in a list of top engineering specialty programs also featured in the publication. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was ranked first in this category.

In the magazine's list of engineering schools offering the Ph.D., UD was ranked 53rd and tied with, among others, Rutgers University and the University of Iowa. MIT was the top-ranked engineering school in the country.

Princeton University was ranked the top national university, and UD appeared in the second tier of schools in this grouping, which includes private schools.

For its rankings, U.S. News categorizes colleges by mission and region, gathering data on 16 indicators–such as academic reputation, retention, faculty resources and student selectivity–and then ranks colleges against their peers in each category, based on a composite, weighted score.

Complete rankings are available on the magazine's web site at [www.usnews.com].

In a separate ranking, the October issue of the Yahoo Internet Life magazine has named UD the eighth most technologically advanced university in the nation in its fifth annual "100 Most-Wired Colleges" report. UD officials, along with numerous other colleges and universities, opted not to participate in this year's Yahoo Internet Life survey, and it still was ranked in the top 10. Last year's top-rated school, Carnegie Mellon University, held on to its number-one ranking.

"Nationally, there is an increased appreciation of the many strengths of the University of Delaware–its faculty, its student body, its research initiatives and its beautiful campus," President David P. Roselle said.

In the last decade, UD has produced three Rhodes Scholars and had alumni named back-to-back MacArthur Fellows. The Class of 2001 alone produced a Rhodes Scholar, a Mitchell Scholar, a Truman Scholar and a member of USA Today's All-USA College Academic First Team.

"The Class of 2005 promises to follow in that tradition of excellence," Roselle said, noting that the freshman class of 3,450 students includes a record 390 who had high school grade point averages of 4.0 and 40 who were valedictorians.

During the last academic year, UD underwent a Middle States Commission on Higher Education reaccreditation review that resulted in a report full of praise for the state of the University.

UD "has every reason to take enormous pride in what it has accomplished over the past 10 years. A decade ago, it was coming out of a period of considerable turmoil. Today, the University is seen as a national model for the integration of information technology in every aspect of university life: teaching and learning, research and service, academic support and campus administration," the evaluation team wrote.

The report also praised UD's physical plant, which it says, "has few, if any, peers among public universities and would be the envy of most private colleges.

"Better than almost any university we are familiar with, Delaware has a clear sense of what it wants to be, namely, a university that offers a high quality undergraduate education with targeted areas of excellence in graduate education and research," the report says.

The evaluation team wrote that "these substantial achievements could not have happened without extraordinary leadership from the senior administration."

Additionally, the team members said they were "enormously impressed by the high level of morale that pervades the faculty, staff and students. Almost without exception, the people we spoke to take great pride in being part of the University."

The self-study and reaffirmation process occurs every 10 years. In 1921, when the Middle States Association was formed, the University of Delaware was among the first institutions accredited by the group, and it has been continuously accredited since that time.