<p>Which one is the best choice?? I dont know which one to choose because by comparing the mechanical engineering ranking: UIUC > CMU > JHU However, in term of prestige and overall ranking, JHU > CMU > UIUC… which one is the best choice for me?? If I also want to do MBA in the future, which one has the best name recognition??</p>
<p>UIUC is highly prestigious among employers and that’s all that matters. I think they are easily the best for mechE from your list.</p>
<p>i agree with gator, uiuc is one of the best public schools for engineering(with uc berkely and u michigan), and jhu is king of biomedical e but not anything else.</p>
<p>uiuc would be the best choice. If you want to major cs, go for cmu. Other than that, uiuc is the number one choice. uiuc engineering is a great public engineering school with uc berkeley.</p>
<p>UIUC ranks higher than CMU for ME, but CMU is a much smaller school where you are likely to get more attention from professors and have more opportunities to do undergraduate research. If you can afford it, I’d say go to CMU (remember CMU is significantly more expensive than UIUC).</p>
<p>PS: Keep in mind USN&WR rankings should also be taken with a grain of salt. Since the specialty rankings are based on peer assessment only, big state schools like UIUC with a large number of alumni tend to be favored by the ranking methodology.</p>
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<p>The PA score has nothing to do with the number of alumni or what alumni think. It’s a measure of how peer institutions perceive the school’s scholarly quality.</p>
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<p>The PA score is essentially based on a survey of deans and department heads from peer institutions. Schools that have a large number of alumni in academic positions are favored because their alumni are statistically surveyed more often, and tend naturally to rank their alma mater higher when included in the survey. Conversely, the likelihood of graduates of a smaller school being surveyed is comparatively low given their smaller numbers, even when the smaller school sends a relatively high percentage of its graduates to academia.</p>
<p>Incidentally, if USN&WR wanted to assess the “scholarly quality” of a program, it would be much more rational to do so by objective criteria such as number of publications per faculty, number of citations per faculty, or number of faculty who have received awards/distinctions, sit in editorial boards of top journals, and are members of the select scientific academies and technical committees. An open survey of deans, many of whom don’t even return the survey form, is a pretty poor and unreliable measure of scholarly quality. That’s why international rankings like those from THES (Times of London Higher Education Supplement) are far more accurate than the USN&WR ranking.</p>
<p>“An open survey of deans, many of whom don’t even return the survey form, is a pretty poor and unreliable measure of scholarly quality.”</p>
<p>Amen. Ditto the opinions of recruiters. same problem, a lot of them don’t return the survey form, so who really knows what they think. you’re only getting the opinion of a small % of people who know anything about the school. with USNW, the devil’s in the details.</p>