A Practical Guide to The Gourman Report
The Gourman Report A Rating Of Undergraduate Programs In American And Canadian Universities
The Gourman Report was first published in 1993 by Glenn Loury and François Gourman. It attempted to rate colleges and universities across the United States and Canada using a methodology that borrowed heavily from the Michelin Guide system. You would get a book, flip to the section for your school, and find letter grades assigned to individual academic programs. That was it. No detailed explanation of how those grades were reached, no weighted composite scores, just a long list of institutional program ratings. I ran into this when I was helping a family member compare transfer options between mid-tier public universities. We pulled the Gourman Report off a library shelf because it was the only ranking source we had that broke things down by specific department rather than giving an overall school score. The problem was that the methodology was almost entirely opaque. There was no public rubric, no peer review survey data that could be verified, and the selection of which programs to grade varied from edition to edition. I ended up spending more time trying to figure out what a B+ in History actually meant at one school versus another than I did making any actual decision. Here is how the report actually worked. The authors visited or submitted questionnaires to academic programs across the country. They rated each program as excellent, good, average, minimal, or none. These mapped to letter grades. Then they compiled everything into a directory organized by institution and by discipline. The whole thing ran over a thousand pages in its most recent editions. The idea was that a student looking at, say, engineering programs could see which schools had AA or A ratings versus those rated C or lower. It sounded useful on paper.
The main issue nobody talked about enough was the sample bias. Programs that responded to surveys got ranked. Programs that ignored the survey got no grade at all, which sometimes looked like a negative rating to an uninformed reader. I saw this happen with a small liberal arts college whose economics department simply never filled out the questionnaire. On the page it looked unranked, which someone scanning quickly might interpret as weak. It was not weak. It was just absent from the data set. When I called the department chair directly to check, she confirmed they had never received the survey invitation. That kind of gap made the report unreliable for any school with a low response rate. Another practical problem is the timeframe. The editions came out several years apart, and the data inside each edition was often years old by the time it hit the shelf. I remember looking at a 1998 edition that cited peer assessments conducted in 1995 or earlier. Academic programs change. Faculty hires, funding shifts, accreditation outcomes. A grade from three years prior does not necessarily reflect the current state of a program. This is especially true for professional programs like business, nursing, or education, where curriculum standards get updated frequently.
What the report actually measures
The Gourman Report focused on academic program quality, not campus life, cost, selectivity, or employment outcomes. It did not rank student satisfaction, graduation rates, or post-graduation earnings. If you are trying to decide between two schools based on those factors, the Gourman Report will not help you. It was purely a peer assessment and self-reporting hybrid for individual departments. The ratings were assigned within disciplines. You would not get a single overall school grade. You would get a grade for English, a different one for Chemistry, another for Political Science, and so on. Some schools would look strong across the board. Others would have a few bright spots and a lot of unranked or low-rated departments. That granularity was the main selling point, and it remains the most useful thing about the report if you know how to read it carefully.
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Where to find it
The Gourman Report is out of print. You will not find it at a major bookseller anymore. Your best options are university libraries, some public library systems, and secondhand book sites like AbeBooks or Amazon Marketplace. I found a copy on a used book site for about eighteen dollars in decent condition. The PDF versions floating around the internet are mostly scans of the 1993 and 1998 editions, and they are hard to search through because the images are not always cleanly OCR'd. Start by identifying the specific programs you care about. Do not flip through the whole book looking for general impressions. Go straight to the discipline index, find your program, and note which schools carry top ratings. Then cross-reference those schools with other data sources. Look at accreditation status, faculty credentials, lab facilities, and placement records. The Gourman Report can narrow your list, but it should not be the final word on anything. If you do use it, treat the grades as directional signals rather than definitive scores. An AA or A rating is a positive signal. A C or lower is a red flag worth investigating. An unranked program is not necessarily bad. It might just be unreported. I learned that the hard way after almost writing off a solid mathematics program because it had no Gourman rating. A quick call to the department confirmed they were ABET accredited and had been producing placements at regional employers for years.
Alternatives that exist now
For most people looking at undergraduate program quality, the current landscape offers better tools. US News has institutional and program-level rankings with explicit methodology. The Niche platform incorporates student and parent reviews alongside academic data. Professional accreditation bodies maintain their own lists. Some disciplines have specialized rankings from discipline-specific organizations. These are not perfect either, but they are more transparent about their methods and tend to update more frequently. The Gourman Report is a piece of academic ranking history. It was one of the first serious attempts to apply a structured rating system to undergraduate programs in North America. It had real flaws, and those flaws make it unreliable as a standalone decision tool. But as a supplementary reference, especially for digging into program-level details that broader rankings skip over, it still has some use. Just read it with your skepticism turned up and verify everything it tells you against current, primary sources.
