crossover9789

can someone put civil?

tivesrx

Whoot, Berkeley ME #2. Take that Stanford. Do you happen to have the peers scores for those?

Troteck

I second the civil rankings.

Marines920

can someone put industrial please?

hysteria

aerospace please.

kennyk616

electrical engineering plzzzz

hysteria

Aero:
1. MIT
2. GaTech
3. UMich
4. Purdue
5. Stanford

Industrial:
1.GaTech
2. Purdue
3. UMich
4. Penn State
5. Berkeley

Electrical:
1. MIT
2. Stanford
3. Berkeley
4. Illinois
5. UMich

Civil:
1. Illinois
2. Berkeley
3. GaTech
4. MIT
Stanford
UT Austin

poisonedapple

where is UT austin in electrical engineering

hysteria

they only rank the first 5 schools in the book version if someone has the online version the complete Aerospace rankings would be much appreciated.

redbeard

Would this be a good time to point out that these rankings are meaningless?

Okay, let's try a little experiment. The NFL season is upon us. It will not be hard to find "rankings" of NFL teams done by various odds-makers, prognosticators, fantasy-football fans, and the occasional Playboy playmate... Heck, I bet we could get USN&WR's rankings of NFL teams.

Then, at the end of the season, let's see where the teams turn out. That will tell you how well this 'ranking' process works.

On the other hand, you can consult psalmists, astrologers, dowsers, and other fortune-tellers. But, since you are interested in engineering, don't you think it's best to leave this pseudoscience to Hollywood?

I'm betting this post will be ignored, and the next question will be, "Where's XYZ U's biomed/CS program ranked?" Argh.

crossover9789

redbeard

dont hate

srk_fx

Undergraduate engineering specialties:
Electrical / Electronic / Communications
(At schools whose highest degree is a doctorate)

1. Massachusetts Inst. of Technology
2. Stanford University (CA)
3. University of California–Berkeley *
4. U. of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign *
5. University of Michigan–Ann Arbor *
6. Georgia Institute of Technology *
7. California Institute of Technology
8. Cornell University (NY)
9. Purdue Univ.–West Lafayette (IN)*
10. Carnegie Mellon University (PA)
11. University of Texas–Austin *
12. Princeton University (NJ)
13. Univ. of California–Los Angeles *
14. Univ. of Wisconsin–Madison *
15. Rice University (TX)
16. Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst. (NY)
Univ. of Southern California
18. Northwestern University (IL)
19. Duke University (NC)
Texas A&M Univ.–College Station *
Univ. of California–San Diego *
University of Washington *
Virginia Tech *
24. Pennsylvania State U.–University Park *
Univ. of Maryland–College Park *
Univ. of Minnesota–Twin Cities *
27. Johns Hopkins University (MD)

aibarr

Still, redbeard's got a point. A really good one, too. These rankings are determined by an algorithm developed by US News. They rank various things based upon various faculty members' opinions and some statistics and ratios, based upon what everyone feels are the "most important" statistics and ratios and opinions, those elements that make good programs better than others. Then, you get some programs ranking within a point or two of other programs, and several clustered all together... It's a thousand guesses slapped together and then it's sliced delicately into discrete ranks.

So, it's all conjecture, anyhow. What makes a program good? The French didn't come up with the phrase "je ne sais quoi" for nothin'. It's really tough to pinpoint why various programs are better than others, so there really is a whole lot of "divining" going on.

That being said...

These rankings aren't completely and totally worthless. There's some method to the madness. Just, please, take all the rankings with a grain of salt. The number five institution may actually be better than the number 4 institution, especially when you're talking about the highly personal and incredibly subjective matching of a student to a school.

Pretty much anything in the top twenty or thirty programs will provide you with a comparable education. From that list of the top chunk of programs, see which environment fits you best, where you feel most comfortable. Even so, don't rule out other programs that aren't ranked, either. I know several folks from weird backgrounds that have gone to get into amazing grad programs and have secured their ultimate dream jobs. Heck, Einstein was a patent clerk.

anxiousmom

The rankings are totally based on "peer review". As in, hey, you professor at university, which schools do you think have strong (aka well-known, as in, produce lots of research and send professors and students to lots of conferences) programs? Top ranked programs really are just the ones that have the most buzz and are most visible. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy - kind of chicken and egg. Most of the highly ranked Doctoral schools are ranked based on the reputation of their grad programs. It is meaningless for determing the quality of education at the undergraduate level.

morfinx

^ What the lady said (aibarr)

The general engineering ranking are based on emperical facts for the most part (acceptance scores, faculty to student ratio etc), although US News decides what they think is important by putting weights on each statistic. So depending on how much you value a given statistic (ie you may believe that the annual research expenditure is very important), you may find the ranking more or less helpful.

As for the individual program rankings, that's purely based on what deans at other colleges think of the program, without using any other useful statistics. So it's quite subjective.

What all is said and done, rankings should only be used as a guide. There are many things to be said about the quality of a program that cannot be derived from a ranking. Don't use ranking as your only metric.