Does anyone know what university has the best landscape architecture design program?

Carlton Lastrapes: I'd suggest that your friend visit his local library. Most libraries will have at least the current year's Peterson's Guides, which will at least give him a list of what institutions offer this degree. If they don't have Peterson's Guides, they may have something similar, such as the College Blue Book or another guide to which colleges have what programs.To give you an idea of what's out there, I checked Peterson's Testing & Education Resource Center (a library database) and found 67 programs in landscape architecture. While Peterson's doesn't rank the schools best-to-worst, they do list how difficult the overall college or university (not just the program) is to get into. Those schools with landscape architecture programs and a ranking of "Very Difficult" were:University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignUniversity of Wisconsin-MadisonUniversity of MichiganUniversity of FloridaUniversity of British ColumbiaNorth Carolina State UniversityCollege of the ! Atlantic (Bar Harbor, ME)University of California-BerkeleyPennsylvania State University-Park (University Park, PA)U.S. News and World Report (USNWR), the big name in college rankings, does offer a search of colleges by major, and they list 52 schools that offer landscape architecture. You can do the search here: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/tools/bri... If you subscribe to USNWR's Premium Edition, you can look at directory information about the schools, including "admissions details, financial aid offerings, and an academics profile". But before you pay for that premium edition, I'd strongly advise visiting your local library, since there's unlikely to be anything in USNWR's reports that you can't get in any other directory of colleges. You can cross-check USNWR's list of landscape architecture programs with its other lists of best colleges and such, and see if you come up with a short list that way.Finding a list that ranks programs may be harder, and thos! e lists are (at least in higher education) notoriously subject! ive. Plus, at least for undergraduate programs, it's very difficult to find lists of best/worst schools outside of business, engineering, and liberal arts. The reputation of the school overall is what will matter, and the quality of the overall education, not just the education in the major.USNWR's "America's Best Colleges 2008" does have some good articles on choosing colleges, including one on narrowing down your choices and another on what programs to look for at a school. (For more articles from "America's Best Colleges 2008", click here.)The Princeton Review also does college rankings, but it's on intangibles such as whether a school is a party school or has good professors, all based on student surveys- and they may only have one or two respones from a campus, which can make things look much better or worse than they really are. Still, it's another set of opinions: http://www.princetonreview.com/college-rankings.as...Good luck!...Show more

Shelley Stevens: ! Check out the Times University Rankings. You can compare by subject, but I doubt they'll have landscape architecture on the list, so choose something similar. That should still give you a good idea about which universities have good departments for that subject.http://extras.timesonline.co.uk/tol_gug/gooduniver...