<p>UVa is ranked highly overall, but known more for things like liberal arts or law. 37th in Engineering isn’t exciting because many cheaper schools (even VaTech, which you talk about as if it were much worse) are ranked higher and send more grads to top tier engineering jobs. Quite frankly, a UVa degree merits a “so what?” in the engineering world.</p>
<p>Ranking isn’t everything, especially overall rankings. US News might say UVa is the second best public, but I’d place it a couple publics back. If we’re talking about engineering, you’d be a fool to try and pass it off as even a top 10 public. One of the main reasons the OP likes UVa is clearly because US News gave it a high overall rank, but that really is not helping for engineering, which is also one of the majors where rank matters least to begin with.</p>
<p>Weldon, as for your son, his decision does not in any way prove that UVa has a strong engineering program. It does suggest that he also looks a bit too much at a certain overall ranking, and possibly that you are either wealthy enough to send him anywhere he wants without a second thought, or that he doesn’t consider what debt will mean for him in the future. In either of those cases, his actions would not apply in the OP’s situation.</p>
<p>Long story short, there are some public engineering programs (Berkeley, Michigan, Texas and similar) that even put most of the ivies to shame, but UVa is not one of them. You will be in a better situation if you are employed in engineering and debt free than if you were employed in engineering and 70k under with a degree from UVa.</p>