Why is it such a great school?

hawkette
Sat, 28 Jul 2007 00:40:29 +0000

Alexandre,
While we may disagree often on the national prominence of U Michigan, I am not going to make up data. Here is how I got the score that I did and it was the same process for all schools.

First, calculate the number of engineering categories that a school is ranked in. For U Michigan, they have rankings in 11 of the 12 areas for which ranks are provided.

Second, add up all of the ranks. For U Michigan, that totaled to 62.

Third, divide the total of the ranks by the number of areas in which a program is ranked. (I didn’t penalize a school for not having a rank because I did not know if that meant that they aren’t good or they don’t offer it). For U Michigan, the result was 5.64.

A similar process was done for the other five schools and their scores are what I posted in #10 which I reproduce again here:


MIT-10 programs, average rank of 2.90
Stanford-11 programs, average rank of 4.73
UC Berkeley-11 programs, average rank of 5.09
Georgia Tech-9 programs, average rank of 5.33
U Illinois-12 programs, average rank of 5.58


Given our sometimes contentious interactions, I can understand your concern. I hope that my explanation satisfies you.

Re the process that I used, I think it was pretty simplistic and certainly there are other ways that one could look at the data, but I think it is pretty clear that these five schools (and U Michigan and several others just out of my top five) have excellent engineering and program breadth and depth. Georgia Tech is a premier school in this area and that was my message to the OP.