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<p>Uh, because the very premise of the thread is that rankings don’t matter. The way to show that is to then compare all of the schools, or a random sample of the schools and show that some output variable does not change. You cannot prove that rankings don’t matter by simply looking at the top X units in a ranking. </p>
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<p>You are not performing your calculations correctly. Those schools do not have a 75%+ engineering graduation rate. They have a 75%+ overall graduation rate, which says nothing about the percentage of engineering students who are actually graduating. There is no doubt that plenty of engineering students switch out of engineering to some other major and manage to graduate that way. But that has nothing to do with the engineering graduation rate, which would be calculated by factoring in all of the students who start in engineering and then actually manage to finish the engineering degree. </p>
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<p>See above. The fatal flaw in your argument is that you have confused engineering graduation rates with overall graduation rates. I think most people who have actually majored in engineering will have strong memories of many people they knew who started in engineering but never finished - but did manage to earn a degree in another major. These students would therefore count as far as overall graduation is concerned, but not engineering graduation.</p>
<p>As a case in point, consider Berkeley. Berkeley’s 6-year graduation rate is nearly 90%. But the engineering graduation rate is far lower - probably around 50%, or perhaps even less. Many of those engineers switch to some other major. Many others simply flunk out or drop out completely, but there are since there are relatively few engineers at Berkeley - being about 11% of the undergrad population - it doesn’t greatly affect the overall graduation rate.</p>