Four Options For Ranking Urban Planning Programs

UCLA urban planning professor Randall Crane offers his observations on the four options that planning schools have for helping applicants decide to which schools they should apply and attend.

1 minute read

December 10, 2007, 8:00 AM PST

By Chris Steins @planetizen


"My first point is that applicants do certainly rank programs when they decide where to apply and then where to attend. Didn't you? So the question is less whether ranking is advisable than how applicants do it, whether that can be improved, and then whether our individual schools, our organization (ACSP), or other organizations (e.g., Planetizen) can contribute to or interfere with those efforts."

"...I trust prospective students to understand there is no definitive, unidimensional way to rank either (a) a Masters program's comparative strengths and weaknesses or, specifically, (b) what that program has to offer as value-added to produce better practitioners."

Saturday, December 8, 2007 in Urban Planning Research by Randall Crane

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