Pitt (19K) vs Boston University (48K) for biomedical engineering?

NiceUnparticularMan
Wed, 09 Apr 2025 13:57:19 +0000

Sounds like you don’t need it, but I thought I would toss in some additional validation. Whenever the topic of field-specific research comes up, I like to look at Edurank, which is really focused just on research measures. Not that this is necessarily definitive, but it is an empirical approach at least.

Anyway, here is their study of Biomedical Engineering:

EduRank.org - Discover university rankings by location – 11 Aug 21

Best Biomedical Engineering schools in the US [Rankings]

Below is the list of 100 best universities for Biomedical Engineering in the United States ranked based on their research performance: a graph of 7.54M citations received by 189K academic papers made by these universities was used to calculate...

And Pitt was ranked #5 in the US, and in fact the world (US universities are quite strong in this area).

Now BU was ranked #40 in the US (#78 in the world), and honestly that is plenty good enough for undergraduate purposes. So if it was some combination of less expensive and/or strongly preferred for other reasons, I think it would be fine to choose BU.

But in your circumstances? I mean, with Pitt you are truly talking about one of the strongest research universities in the world in this area. So that’s pretty cool.