<p>For those of you that do not want to spend the money for the full report, Architectural Record has a good summary of the 2013 Design Intelligence school rankings;</p>
<p>Talk to some senior architects and they’ll tell you the rankings don’t mean much, and the selection of an architecture school isn’t that important either. Your innate talent, work experience, and work-ethic will determine your fate in an architectural firm, not your pedigree. Your architecture program needs to be accredited, and it helps if its located near/within a major metropolitan area for easier access to internships and initial jobs, but personal affordability of that architecture degree (tuition, living expenses, housing, travel, etc) should be the most important criteria in chosing a program. Salaries are low in architecture, ROI for the amount of education, internship length, and liability exposure for firm/partners is not as attractive as an MBA or MD or Top-30 JD. It’s difficult to pay $150,000 in student loans when your salary starts around $35,000/year with small annual bumps.</p>
<p>"personal affordability of that architecture degree (tuition, living expenses, housing, travel, etc) should be the most important criteria in chosing a program:</p>
<p>I totally agree with everything you said higgins, but esp that statement. Really with the job market today, the school of choice for any academic program should have this as the #1 criteria. No one should think that where they go to school creates the opportunity for success; it is the individual. </p>
<p>Wen we were first looking into programs we used these publications just as a starting point to see if where we could afford offered accredited and, yes, well thought of programs. Go where you will come out with the least amount of debt and if you are lucky to have a cost effective school also be one that is well regarded, count yourself lucky as having an opportunity to take advantage of it. If you can’t go to one on one of those listed, be equally grateful and take advantage of the opportunity to go wherever you can afford to go!</p>
<p>I somewhat agree with what you guys have said. Don’t get into huge debt, and what you accomplish in school is more important than the school itself. However among affordable state schools there are some outstanding ones, and there are some dogs. There are many schools I would not recruit at because the quality of the work is poor. Why handicap yourself? After your first job it starts to matter less and less, but I think it is important when graduating.</p>
<p>You don’t need to go to Cornell or Rice to get a good education. Here in the SW we find outstanding students at UT Austin, KU, K state, and UT Arlington. All of there schools have been highly rated in the past by DI and we have gotten outstanding students there. They are no more expensive than the poor schools. Take your time and do your research.</p>
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