Engineering: Carnegie Mellon or Georgia Tech?

boneh3ad
Tue, 30 Mar 2010 16:46:31 +0000

TomBor:

I don’t really understand how the ranking systems in the US work, but wouldn’t the college with higher SAT and GPA standards be better ranked?



Not at all. As mentioned before, small private schools are generally more selective because they can be. Some schools are less selective because they are large state schools that have room for lots of people. The rankings are based on the quality of education you receive (arguably), not the average ACT score of the matriculant. If it was based on the entry requirements, Harvard would outrank most of the top engineering schools, yet the fact remains that Harvard is only really an above average engineering program. More important to rankings is the faculty/student ratio, research expenditure per student, peer and industrial reputation and quality of professors along with various other subjective and objective measures of quality.

The most important thing to remember about rankings, though, is that they are not perfect. They are good at placing a school in generally the right area, but there is always some degree of subjectivity to the system. If two schools are ranked 5 and 20, it is a good bet that school 5 is better than school 20 based on the rankings, however, if two schools are ranked 5 and 6 in the rankings, there really is no guarantee that 5 is better than 6. The rankings are made up by people, and people are, as always, prone to error and/or bias.