Take it to the rank

Ah, school rankings -- total bulls$!%, but necessary total bulls$!%. Like, how else would America's youth, like, figure out where to go to school* without doing any, like, research?

DesignIntellegence just released its 2007 list of the country's best architecture and design schools. And UO's School of Architecture and Allied Arts did pretty well.

Where the Ducks landed:

Undergraduate landscape architecture ranked third in the region (the region is Alaska, Hawaii, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming) and first in the category of skills assessments for sustainable design concepts and principles. Nationally, the undergraduate landscape architecture program tied for 15th and the graduate landscape architecture program was ranked 13th.

The architecture grad program tied (with Southern California Institute of Architecture) for first in the western region. Undergrad architecture was second in the western region, and second in the category category of skills assessments for sustainable design concepts and principles. Nationally, the undergraduate architecture program ranked 15th.

Undergraduate and graduate interior architecture programs were ranked first in the region and second in the category of skills assessments for sustainable design concepts and principles. Nationally, the undergraduate interior design program was ranked 10th and the graduate interior design program sixth.

Rankings were based on survey of industry leaders and private-sector professionals involved in hiring.

*Confession: I'm such a sucker for rankings. I got my grad degree at a journalism school that consistently ranked first or second in the country. That is, until the practice of ranking journalism schools was discontinued, mostly because the last list had a program that didn't actually exist in its top five. Nice work, fourth estate.