Your experience with NU’s reputation vs Rice/Vanderbilt doesn’t match mine or any international rankings. How would people in Italy know the comparison outside of international rankings is beyond me. Northwestern has a top-10 business school in the world for quite some time whereas R/V don’t really have any world-renowned schools. Also in engineering, NU is top-5 in industrial engineering and management sciences, top-3 in material sciences and top-10 in BME. In civil engineering, its transportation center is considered the best research center in the country. For VU, I am not aware of any engineering department in the top-20. In mathematics, USN has NU at 17th and VU 46th. But somehow you consider their engineering as “wash” and VU may be stronger in math. I went to grad school in engineering, worked as an engineer before switching to finance. But my professional experience has told me nothing on how programs are compared. None of my colleague talk about how programs in different schools are compared even in their fields, let alone others. It’s interesting to me that you have the kind of experience that would let you form an opinion that is so different from published rankings. By the way, published rankings are largely based on reputation rankings among experts in the fields.