Ranking of US graduate schools based on your priorities

You can do it for your field at the PhDs.org site. For example, if you are an Indian student looking for a high-prestige school, two things that would matter most to you would be (a) indicators of faculty quality and (b) financial assistance. So, I tried a combination that places a lot of value ("extremely important"!) on funding and faculty quality, with other things (such as program size or SAT scores of undergraduates) receiving a priority of "important" or less. For materials science, I got this list which has Northwestern, Caltech, MIT, PennState and UPenn at the top.

The site also offers canned versions of rankings. For example, here's the ranking for "large prestigious programs" in materials science. This one has PennState, Northwestern, MIT, UC-Santa Barbara and Cornell occupying the top five slots.

Do check out this Inside HigherEd story that has more details about this very wonderful way of ranking graduate schools and about some of its limitations.

Even if you don't care much for rankings, you would still be interested in getting some basic data on many different kinds of parameters. The PhDs.org site is useful just for giving us this data in one place. The ranking feature -- interesting as it is -- is icing on the data cake!