Tomorrow, the National Research Council will release the data and its reports from the latest effort to rank doctoral programs. The big change this time is less reliance on "reputation" and more on relatively objective things, such as median time-to-degree. We love the image Inside Higher Ed uses in its coverage of the impending release of data. 

(Photo by the Flickr user Captain McDan. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Here is the link to the official NRC page about this.

If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin with six major steps:

1. "Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs";
2. "Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs";
3. "Increase collaboration among institutions";
4. "Transform the traditional dissertation";
5. "Expand the range of professional options for graduate students"; and
6. "Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure."