Engineering Rankings Trustworthy?

boneh3ad
Mon, 18 Feb 2013 13:08:20 +0000

The rankings are good for some things. In particular, they are good at ranking schools into the general areas they belong. In other words, a school ranked 10 in US News is correctly identified as being quite a bit better than a school ranked, say, 60. However, they are not something you should look at to differentiate between a school ranked 9 and 10 or 45 and 50 or anything like that. In other words, they do a pretty good job of establishing tiers, but don’t read too much into them more than that.

Keep in mind that while the overall acceptance rate at UIUC is fairly high, this is in part because the state mandates a certain number of in-state admits to the flagship school each year and partially because the school as a whole is much easier to get into than engineering. The engineering school is absolutely top notch… world-renowned.

So anyway, what did I like? I liked just about everything to be honest. I enjoyed my studies in mechanical engineering and thought I had absolutely every opportunity that I could have wanted (e.g. undergraduate research). I enjoyed my social life. Really the only things I didn’t like were that there were an awful lot of frats, the winters are that horrible combination of wind and cold that just utterly sucks if you walk everywhere, and the Blind Pig was just a little too far to walk for a beer.