<p>I went to a speech where I live by a MIT provost (there are apparently tons of really old people who went to MIT in the 30’s living around my town). Anyways, what he said was along these lines:</p>
<p>MIT right now is ranked very highly in every engineering field, but that’s just because we currently have some of the most respected professors in all of the fields. Georgia Tech is similar, choosing to be as good in all the fields as they can, and they manage to be highly respected in most fields, but if they wanted to they could be number one in a specific field. They just choose not to. The same goes for Harvard, who could buy all of our chemical engineering professors if they wanted to, they just spend their money in different areas.</p>
<p>In other words, Georgia Tech is pretty darn close to MIT in the engineering fields (close enough that a couple of interchanged professors would make the difference), which is always a good sign.</p>