Inside Higher Ed reports today that the National Research Council has launched its latest study to assess U.S. research doctorate programs.  Like previous efforts in 1983 and 1995, the new study is designed to:

• Help universities improve their doctoral programs through benchmarking
• Benefit the nation’s research capacity by improving the quality of doctoral programs and their students
• Help students applying to graduate programs to choose programs that will best meet their needs

According to Inside Higher Ed, the new study "has had a makeover since the heavily used and widely respected review was last conducted in 1995. Among the major changes in the ratings system and methodology:

• Programs will be measured (and probably grouped in bands, rather than listed from No. 1 on down) based on a set of quantitative data rather than scholars’ ratings of their peers.
• A significant expansion in the number of disciplines to be reviewed, as well as a decision to gather information on (but not rate) a set of “emerging” fields, including such diverse topics as nanoscience, feminist and sexuality studies, and science and technology studies.
• Universities will have to pay to participate."

There is a lot of discussion of the shift from "soft" reputation surveys to "hard" quantiitative data:

[T]he [1995] study rated doctoral programs primarily based on the views of scholars about which were the best programs in their fields, rather than on more objective and quantifiable data. The NRC’s new methodology (which is still a work in progress, to be refined between now and next spring by a panel of administrators and scholars) aims to resolve both problems. First, the NRC will no longer base its ratings of programs on what Charlotte V. Kuh, who oversees the council’s ratings, calls the “soft” measure of scholars’ opinions. Instead, the NRC will base the ratings on a slew of statistics on such traditional subjects as research funding and faculty publications, and on a new set of data it is collecting about how students are treated and how they perform, including attrition rates and the time it takes students to complete their degrees. ( The questionnaire for institutions also seek statistics that take into account how well programs prepare graduates to teach, among other measures.) One major task awaiting the NRC panel, Kuh said, is to decide how to meld the various statistics into a cohesive rating.