Operations Research Management Science - Inside Story

<BODY bgcolor="#ffffff" link="cc0000" vlink="cc0000" text="#000000"> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=4 border=0><br>   <table border=0 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0 width=480><tr valign=top> <td width=10><img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 hspace=4 border=0></td> <td width=470> <FONT face="verdana, arial, helvetica" SIZE=2><B><I><A HREF="../../ORMS.shtml" TARGET="_top">OR/MS Today</A> - February 2004</I></B></font><BR> <hr size="1"> <img src="cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=4 border=0><br> <font face="times new roman, times"> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=4 border=0><br> <FONT face="verdana, arial, helvetica" SIZE=2><B>Inside Story</B></FONT><br> <IMG SRC="../barbluehook.gif" WIDTH="468" HEIGHT="4"><br> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=8 border=0><br> <FONT SIZE="+2"><B>Not the Usual Suspect</B></FONT><BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=6 border=0><br> <FONT face="verdana, arial, helvetica" SIZE=2><B>Peter Horner, editor<BR> <I><A HREF="mailto:horner@lionhrtpub.com">horner@lionhrtpub.com</A></I></B></FONT><br> <hr size="1"> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=12 border=0><br>    Every year, <I>U.S. News & World Report</I> ranks the top colleges and universities in the country. The magazine offers a smorgasbord of rankings, including private schools, public schools, doctorate and master's programs, liberal arts colleges, regional colleges and "best value" schools. The magazine ranks schools based on the number of students receiving merit aid, the number of transfer students, even the number of students in fraternities and sororities. <P>The magazine carefully details the criteria it uses in the selection process, noting such factors as peer assessment, graduation and retention rates, average freshmen SAT scores, admissions acceptance rates, freshmen in the top 10 percent of their high school class, student/faculty ratio, class size, graduation rate, percentage of full-time faculty, endowment and alumni giving rate. <P>The magazine goes to great lengths to convince readers that the rankings are unbiased and scientifically sound based on criteria any reasonable person would find credible. And every time the rankings come out, the howling begins  almost always from schools that didn't rank as high as they thought they should. <P>At last fall's INFORMS meeting in Atlanta, I asked several icons of OR education about this notion I had of surveying deans and educators around the country and compiling a ranking of the top OR departments. As a confirmed non-academic, I thought such a list would be fun, useful, provocative and kick up a little controversy among our readers. Silly me. Almost to a man and woman, the folks I spoke to advised me not to do it. They told me any methodology I picked would be savaged by this particular audience, and that I would only succeed in making people mad (except, of course, for the faculty, students and alumni of the department that happened to come out on top). Discretion being the better part of valor, I shelved the idea. <P>Still, the muckraker in me won't let it go. Any discussion of the top university OR departments would, depending on criteria and definitions, include the usual suspects: Stanford, U.C. Berkeley (my alma mater, go Bears!), Georgia Tech, George Mason, Cornell, Penn, Penn State, Purdue, Texas, Michigan, Carnegie Mellon, Case Western, Columbia, NYU-Buffalo, Northwestern, Rensselaer, Rutgers, Rochester, Southern Cal, UCLA. Does anybody do a better job of training OR grads for a specific purpose than the Naval Postgraduate School? What about the many fine OR departments embedded at schools in Canada and overseas? Any time you start naming names, you leave names out. No doubt I've just upset faculty at a dozen or more other outstanding OR departments I didn't mention while trying to make a point. <P>Any discussion of the top OR programs, however, begins and arguably ends with the Operations Research Center at MIT. Founded by Philip Morse, the father of operations research in the United States, the ORC celebrates its 50th anniversary this year (<A HREF="mit.html">see page 26</A>). While we can always argue which OR department is the best, we can certainly all join in wishing the ORC best wishes for 50 years of greatness.<BR>  <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=5 border=0><br>  <img src="../barblue.gif" width=468 height=1 border=0 alt=" "><br> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=8 border=0><br> <font face="verdana, arial, helvetica" size="1"> <CENTER><script type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </script></CENTER><br> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=8 border=0><br> <LI> <A HREF="tocfr.html" Target="_top"><I>Table of Contents</A><br> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=4 border=0><br> <LI> <A HREF="../../ORMS.shtml" TARGET="_top"><I>OR/MS Today</I> Home Page</A><br>  <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=8 border=0><br> <img src="../barblue.gif" width=468 height=1 border=0 alt=" "><br> <b><i>OR/MS Today</i></b> copyright © 2004 by <A HREF="http://www.informs.org/" target="_new">the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences</a>. 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