<p>There are many factors that make a school a “best school.” It’s up to each individual person and what they want from a school. </p>
<p>In terms of engineer-scientists, they look at which universities have the best research in their field of work or which professors have the most productive/best research groups, not which “school” is the “most prestigious.”</p>
<p>All I’m saying is that if you measure research quality, Yale, UCSB, Stanford and Caltech appear to come out at the top when measuring research from 1997-2001 (the latest ISI ranking). That’s important to scientists. And that this is perhaps a more important indicator of a good undergraduate program than just which school has the biggest name or the largest number of students.</p>