Pundits may dismiss the U.S. News rankings as superficial, misleading, misguided, or simply a profit-making scheme. Whatever you call them, add "influential" to the list. Right or wrong, people pay attention to them, as do institutions.

So here we go for 2008, graduate style. The "best" are (envelope, please)...

Business
1) Harvard
2) Stanford
3) Penn (Wharton)
4) MIT (Sloan)
5) (Tie) Northwestern (Kellogg), U. Chicago

Law
1) Yale
2) Harvard
3) Stanford
4) NYU
5) Columbia

Medicine (Research)
1) Harvard
2) Johns Hopkins
3) Penn
4) Washington U.
5) UC-San Francisco

Engineering
1) MIT
2) Stanford
3) UC-Berkeley
4) Georgia Tech
5) Illinois

Education
1) Columbia (Teachers College)
2) Stanford
3) (Tie) Harvard, Vanderbilt
5) UCLA