<p>Georgia Tech is an interesting case. Much of its prestige appears to be fairly recent. Looking at the NRC rankings from 1995, GaTech was not especially stellar in the engineering rankings, with quite a few schools ranked above it. That has obviously not been the case with the more recent USNWR rankings. The other interesting point is that although it is considered a “tech” school, theoretical/pure sciences are actually quite weak, especially compared to other flagship publics. Unlike the engineering rankings, the natural science rankings have remained relatively low according to the USNWR graduate science rankings. (There was even an article from Georgia Tech talking about this a few years ago that I’ll try to find online.)</p>
<p>That being said, GaTech’s engineering reputation continues to improve, as readily apparent in the USNWR grad and undergrad engineering rankings. It also is boosted in the overall USNWR undergrad rankings because being a tech-focused school, the general student body is stronger than more broad-purpose public universities like Wisconsin, Illinois, and Texas. (It would certainly be interesting to only compare the engineering/natural science undergrads at these universities against GaTech).</p>
<p>There is a fairly high number of faculty in the prestigious National Academy of Engineering as well, and GaTech continues to hire NAE-caliber faculty away from schools like UT-Austin. I’m sure the reputation will only get better.</p>
<p>In terms of total number of faculty with this honor, GaTech does have an impressive showing relative to all other universities. As a public, only Berkeley and UT-Austin have a greater concentation.</p>
<p>Faculty NAE membership:
MIT 107
Stanford 84
Berkeley 72
UT-Austin 48
Caltech 29
Georgia Tech 25
Illinois 25
UCSB 25
Cornell 23
Michigan 21
Columbia 20
Carnegie Mellon 19
Princeton 19
U Southern California 19
Texas A&M 19
Minnesota 18
Northwestern 18
UCLA 17
UCSD 16
Wisconsin 16
Purdue 15
Harvard 14
Rice 13
Washington 13
Maryland 12
Rensselear 11
Colorado 10
Arizona 10
Va Tech 10
Case Western 9
Johns Hopkins 9
Penn 9
Virginia 9
NC State 8
Utah 7
Florida 6
Houston 6
UC Davis 6
UNC 6
UC Irvine 5
Rochester 5
Yale 5
Brown 4
Dartmouth 4
Kansas 4
U Mass 4
Pittsburgh 4
Duke 3
Tennessee 3
New Mexico 2
Notre Dame 2
Tulsa 2</p>
<p>source <a href=“http://www.nae.edu%5B/url%5D”>www.nae.edu</a></p>