ranking undergraduate engineering schools

mercymom
Thu, 05 Apr 2007 11:33:26 +0000

pearlygate, imo, to a large extent ranking is irrelevant, esplly USNW, even tho everyone uses it or factors it in to their decision making. if you analyze what goes into the ranks, a lot of it is $$, the size of the endowment, and a lot of it is opinion (the deans of the other schools and the corporate recruiters fill out a survey). then look at the % of people who were sent the survey and actually responded to it. a lot of times all a school needs to jump in the rankings is a really good fund raising year (or two). they can raise their opinion index by getting a bunch of visiting professors in to see what they are (ahem) already doing. when the rank goes up after those things has anything changed? they “seem” better but are exactly the same as they were before the bump.

plus rankings don’t tell you things like ga tech’s notorious rep for how brutally they treat their ug’s. their rank is high, but the quality of life is low.