UCSC Review Winter 1996
Surveys cite UCSC's quality of teaching, graduate programs
UC Santa Cruz received high marks in two recently released national surveys of U.S. universities and colleges. In one survey, the 1996 edition of the America's Best Colleges guide, UCSC was ranked as one of the best in the country in a new category in the survey: quality of undergraduate teaching. America's Best Colleges is produced annually by U.S. News & World Report for college-bound students and their parents.
U.S. News asked presidents or chancellors, provosts, and admissions deans from throughout the United States to select schools where the faculty "has an unusually strong commitment to undergraduate teaching." In the category Top National Universities, UCSC was ranked thirteenth.
In another survey, a national analysis of 41 fields at 274 universities, two of UCSC's doctoral programs were judged to be of top-ten quality. In the survey, conducted every ten years by the National Research Council, the UCSC programs ranked in the top ten nationally are astronomy and astrophysics (sixth) and linguistics (tenth). Two other programs--earth sciences and biochemistry and molecular biology--also placed in the top quartile.
The NRC's assessment of doctoral programs reflects the views of nearly 8,000 top faculty members nationwide regarding the quality and effectiveness of graduate programs in educating research scholars and scientists.