US News Engineering Rankings

bruno123
Thu, 09 Apr 2009 10:42:51 +0000

Midmo: An interesting exercise to assess the correlation between prestige and scholarly productivity would be to compare the FSP ranking with the USN&WR graduate rankings (which are solely prestige-based).

MIT engineering for example does well both in the scholarly productivity ranking and in the prestige-based ranking, but its prestige appears to be somewhat “overrated” compared to faculty scholarly output, i.e. MIT programs consistently rank # 1 in peer-assessment at USN&WR, even though, according to FSP, they are not #1 in academic productivity.

On the other hand, GA Tech for example does very well in the specialty peer-assessment rankings (USN&WR), even though comparatively fewer of its graduate engineering programs are listed under the top 10 most productive programs in the corresponding specialties/areas according to the FSP index.

I suspect that, if we were to compute proper correlation coefficients, we would find a positive correlation between research excellency (as measured by FSP) and peer prestige (as measured by US News), but I can’t tell a priori how high that correlation would be.

Curiously, from a quick look at the two rankings, it seems that electrical engineering is one of the areas where the FSP and USN&WR lists differ the most (less so than e.g. in mechanical, civil or aerospace engineering). I wonder why that is the case.