Engineering Rankings by Research Expenditures

G.P.Burdell
Fri, 19 Mar 2010 07:57:44 +0000

They’re likely combining campuses when a university has a main campus with satellites. For example, Georgia Tech is a university with a main campus (Atlanta) and very small satellite campuses (Savannah and Metz, France) with insignificant research. So they are all combined. This is in contrast to a university system that has multiple universities (e.g. UC is a system and UCLA and UCSD are distinct universities, just like USG is a system and GaTech and UGA are distinct universities). Since most states have only one or two public university systems, if you combined all of the systems you would actually be looking at research activity by state, and not by university.

“Engineering, nec” is probably a catch-all for all engineering not otherwise categorized.

Hopkins is first entirely because of the Applied Physics Laboratory and the associated defense contracts. Without that lab, Hopkins would be #44. The question is: how can you accurately separate the engineering occurring in that lab from the non-engineering defense activities? You can’t. That’s why they had to impute the data, which is highly suspect because of the disparity between schools.