<p>Have no fear, OP, engineers who hire engineers know and respect RPI. If the rankings you are referring to are the US News & WR rankings, take them with a grain of salt. When professors around the country are asked to rank programs they think about who is doing a good job of getting grants to support their research–those are the schools the best professors want to be at. It may or may not follow that the best professors produce the best students, but their estimation of programs has little, if anything, to do with the students. I suppose it would also follow that sheer volume of alumni at the bigger schools would lead to greater access to people making decisions about which programs at which schools get the grant money. FWIW, I’ve got a kid at Berkeley and one headed to RPI. I consider them to be in the same league and I know for a fact that at least one CTO agrees with me. It is kind of funny how few people recognize RPI (son wore his Rensselaer sweatshirt today and people actually asked, “what does that mean?” lol Then again, I’ve had people say, “Berkeley…that’s in Minnesota, right?” It all depends on who you’re talking to.)</p>