A recent issue of U.S. News and World Report ranked Iowa State as one of the top 50 public universities in the country.

Iowa State ranked 41st out of 50 public colleges and 87th out of 248 national universities.

The magazine, which hit newsstands Monday, evaluated 248 universities in the country (162 public and 86 private) that offer a wide range of undergraduate majors as well as master’s and doctoral degrees, many of which strongly emphasize research.

The results were positive for Iowa State, but the ranking system didn’t take the university’s strongest attributes into consideration, said John McCarroll, director of university relations.

“[The U.S. News and World Report] is one of the most prominent college rankings, so it’s a valuable tool,” he said. “However, we try to be realistic about the report, because it has certain limitations. It doesn’t include some of our better known programs, such as veterinary medicine, agriculture or architecture. Land grant universities achieving a high ranking in this kind of survey can be difficult, because the surveys don’t include these types of factors.”

The survey ranked colleges on seven factors: peer assessment (where presidents and provosts from other universities rank their peer schools), student retention, faculty resources, student selectivity, financial resources, graduation rate performance and alumni giving rate.

Iowa’s universities follow an Iowa law requiring automatic admittance of all Iowa high school graduates who rank in the top half of their graduating classes.

This liberal admittance process caused Iowa State to rank lower on the survey, McCarroll said.

“This survey gives more credit to being more selective in admissions,” he said. “But we try to provide education to a broad spectrum of the public. There are certain criteria that you look at in the survey. We pay attention to them and try to work on them, such as retention rate and class sizes.”

ISU President Gregory Geoffroy said the U.S. News and World Report’s ranking system was subjective and not a clear indicator of Iowa State’s quality.

“A lot of people don’t put much weight on those surveys,” Geoffroy said. “We don’t often look as good as we believe we are. I never pay attention to those surveys because they’re basically there to sell magazines.”

The University of Iowa did slightly better than Iowa State in the ranking. The University of Iowa ranked 19th among public universities and 57th out of national universities. In addition, the U of I business program ranked 35th, while the ISU business program wasn’t ranked.

In a pre-prepared statement on the U of I Web page, www.uiowa. edu/~ournews/releases.html, U of I President David Skorton said, “Considering the budget cuts we have had to deal with over the last few years, this is especially impressive. We will continue to make a high-quality, affordable education our top priority.”

McCarroll said the survey was not a point of competition between the two schools, considering differences between a university ranked 20th and another ranked 40th were microscopic.

“While there’s some natural competition between the two universities, this is not a situation of us versus the [University of Iowa],” he said. “Our two schools have somewhat different missions.”

Iowa State’s engineering program ranked 34th among schools who offer a doctorate, while the University of Iowa ranked 59th.

“We have a comprehensive engineering program, which is much, much larger than the one at the University of Iowa,” McCarroll said. “That’s an area of some pride here.”