rayricepudding wrote:
Have any of you heard of the QS Global 200 ranking? I recently discovered it and while it's for full-time programs only, it must at least be a decent gauge of global employer respect levels for different programs. While NYU is in the first tier, its employer index is 71, it's over 20 points lower than the top eleven US programs in the rankings (Michigan is number 11 at 94.6, Yale is number 12 at 73.7, and NYU is 13th at 71). For all intents and purposes, there are essentially 11 "top-ten" schools. NYU dropped five spots since last year.
Georgetown falls into the 2nd tier, at number 27 for US schools, with an employer index of 36.7.
Maryland plummeted 24 total spots since last year to number 77 overall, 64 in the US, and has an employer index of 11.9.
With these numbers, and the fact that Maryland has been plummeting in every other ranking, it's pretty scary to consider spending $80,000 there.
I went to NYU for grad school (not at Stern). It's a good school, albeit incredibly bureaucratic. You're not going to get a ton of help from outside your own department. So, make sure Stern has options for career help available to their part time students and make sure you take advantage of it while you're there. To a certain extent, school is what you make of it. A school can have many options for career help, but it won't matter if you don't use them.
See if the adcoms can put you in contact with recent alumni of their part time programs and just pick their brains. It's going to be far more helpful than anything we can tell you here.
As for school rankings, take them with a grain of salt. The people doing these rankings use simple surveys that really only scratch the surface of a school. Also, there's nothing a single school can do in a year that should make it rise or fall significantly. Any ranking that does that is just promoting noise to get press.