March 30 (Bloomberg) -- Harvard University operates the best U.S. programs in business and medical research and surrendered the top title in education to Teachers College at Columbia University, according to an annual ranking of graduate schools.

The education school at Harvard, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, slipped to third behind Teachers College and Stanford University, U.S. News & World Report said today. Harvard's Ivy League rival Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, ranks as having the best law school, while the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also in Cambridge, runs the No. 1 engineering program.

The results mark an unbroken winning streak for Harvard in medicine and for Yale in law since U.S. News began annual graduate-school rankings in 1990. While some college officials say the rankings, based on surveys and statistics, are too simplistic to be useful, schools use the results to promote their programs to prospective students and donors.

``It's worth greater alumni giving, greater funding and higher student applications, which is not bad for a designation I regard as having no meaning,'' said Arthur Levine, 58, who leads the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation in Princeton, New Jersey, and was president of Teachers College until July.

Teachers College recaptured the top education school ranking for the first time since 1998. Stanford ranked second this year, followed by Harvard and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, in a tie for third, and the University of California, Los Angeles, in fifth place.

Bush, Immelt

Harvard Business School ranked first in its category for the fifth time in a row, this year topping 407 master's degree programs in business assessed by U.S. News. The school has graduated 88,400 students since its founding in 1908, including President George W. Bush and General Electric Co. Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt.

U.S. News polled business school deans, corporate recruiters and directors of master's in business administration programs on the academic quality of their peer institutions. The magazine also considered the percentage of students employed at graduation and their starting pay packages.

More than 90 percent of Harvard business students graduated with jobs last year, the best rate among the top 20 programs, and their average earnings rose 7.5 percent from a year earlier to $125,527 in salary and bonuses, U.S. News said.

``The business schools are doing extraordinarily well in terms of salary,'' U.S. News executive editor Brian Kelly, 52, said in an interview from Washington.

Stanford, Wharton

A separate Bloomberg review of business schools last month found that Harvard's 2006 graduates received a record $186,174 in total compensation, including salary, bonuses and other guaranteed income. Graduates at Stanford, near Palo Alto, California, averaged $183,000.

Stanford ranked second in the U.S. News business rankings, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia finished third and MIT's Sloan School of Management fourth. Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management in Evanston, Illinois, and the University of Chicago tied for fifth.

Harvard pays little attention to rankings because singling out schools is ``not all that meaningful,'' said business school spokesman David Lampe, 56. ``They're really little more than beauty contests.''

U.S. News intends the ratings as consumer guides, Kelly said.

``We are not looking to be the arbiter of American higher education,'' he said. ``We are giving people a starting point to start to assess some of these programs.''

Medical Schools

Among medical schools, while Harvard prevailed in research, the University of Washington in Seattle ranked No. 1 for education in primary care.

Harvard's research was buoyed by $1.17 billion in grants from the federal government's National Institutes of Health. The amount was double that of the University of Washington's $573.2 million.

In the research category, Harvard led Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the University of Pennsylvania, Washington University in St. Louis and the University of California, San Francisco.

U.S. News determined its law school rankings in part by selectivity, employment rates at graduation and nine months later and the percentage of alumni passing bar exams.

Yale, which counts U.S. Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas among its graduates, admits the lowest percentage of applicants of any law program in the country, according to the ratings. Harvard, which has five justices on the court, and Stanford tied for second in the law school rankings.

After MIT, the leading engineering schools are Stanford; the University of California, Berkeley; Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta; and the University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign.

The following schools are the top 10 business and law schools, including ties, based on U.S. News & World Report's rankings.

Top 10 U.S. Graduate Schools of Business

1.   Harvard University (Massachusetts)
2.   Stanford University (California)
3.   University of Pennsylvania
4.   Massachusetts Institute of Technology
5.   Northwestern University (Illinois)
     University of Chicago
7.   Dartmouth College (New Hampshire)
8.   University of California, Berkeley
9.   Columbia University (New York)
10.  New York University

Top 10 U.S. Law Schools

1.   Yale University (Connecticut)
2.   Harvard University (Massachusetts)
     Stanford University (California)
4.   New York University
5.   Columbia University (New York)
6.   University of Chicago
     University of Pennsylvania
8.   University of California, Berkeley
     University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
10.  Duke University (North Carolina)
     University of Virginia

Source: U.S. News & World Report

To contact the reporter on this story: Matthew Keenan in Boston at mkeenan6@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: March 30, 2007 00:15 EDT