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Two Metropolitan College online graduate programs ranked in the top 10 in their categories in U.S. News & World Report’s 2014 Best Online Programs. The new ratings, released in January, considered nearly 1,000 programs nationwide.

The master’s program in computer information systems came in 2nd out of 34 schools, topped only by the University of Southern California and tying with Virginia Tech. The program is geared toward those looking to advance their IT careers and is one of MET’s most popular.

The master’s programs in management, which allow students to choose one of six areas of specialization and prepare them to be industry-specific business leaders, were rated 8th among 239 schools.

“The rankings of MET’s online programs place Boston University at the very top in the highly competitive field of professional graduate online education, and reflect and affirm the excellence and dedication of MET students, alumni, faculty, facilitators, and staff,” says Tanya Zlateva, MET dean ad interim and an associate professor of computer science. “Rankings have their faults and limitations, but they have an impact. Students do consider them when choosing a school and U.S. News & World Report rankings are on everybody’s checklist.”

MET introduced its first online program over a decade ago and now offers more than 20 online degree and certificate programs.

ECONOMICS RANKED 12TH IN THE COUNTRY

When BU’s economists talk money, people pay attention. That’s the takeaway from a ranking by RePEc (Research Papers in Economics), which last December placed BU’s economics department 12th out of 477 US institutions.

BU fared better than Dartmouth (18), Cornell (21), and Georgetown (24), while the top three spots went to Harvard, MIT, and the University of Chicago.

RePEc, an international clearinghouse made up of hundreds of volunteers in 80 countries, ranks institutions based on research productivity, using factors such as how many papers a program publishes, how often abstracts are read, and how often papers are cited, explains Barton Lipman, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of economics and department chair. “This data is used to rank both individual economists and economics departments,” he says. “We have a number of very highly ranked economists—people who write a lot of important, prominent, highly cited papers—so we end up high in the rankings. In RePEc’s individual rankings, 4 of our faculty are ranked in the top one percent in the world, 14 in the top 5 percent, and 22 (about half the department) in the top 10 percent.”