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Top University Rankings for 2004 Released
jemecki writes "US News and World Report has posted their annual rankings for the top colleges and universities in America. Of particular interest to Slashdotters are the top Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering universities and the top overall engineering schools. For those that don't want to RTFA, Harvard and Princeton are the best in the country, and MIT, Stanford and Berkeley are the best in Engineering."
I can only see 3 schools listed. Why post the article if we have to pay to see more than 3 schools in the list?
Am I missing something?
if(!cool) exit(-1);
Just want to remind everyone that a lot of the rankings are quite subjective: "The rankings are based solely on the judgments of deans and senior faculty who rated each program they are familiar with on a scale from 1 (marginal) to 5 (distinguished)."
Personally, I'm more interested in which universities have good industry and job opportunities surrounding them, since my first job after getting a degree will likely be close to wherever I graduate from.
I agree. However remember that in-state undergrads at Berkeley pay only about $6k/year for tuition as opposed to $30k...
:)
but it's not for everyone
Same story as usual. Expensive ivy league schools rated best in class!
Although this means nothing to me, I know most slashdot readers and editors will be looking at colleges in about 5 years or so.
Frankly, I've found that the real world puts much less esteem on who granted your degree than the schools themselves do.
Pretentious eggheads laugh at DeVry, employers dont. They usually care if you can do the job, and have appropriate hygeine.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Correct. U of Colorado is the top party school.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/954063.asp?0si=-
TOP PARTY SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO, BOULDER
Boulder, Colorado is said to have an endless amount of things to do: concerts, coffee shops, movies, parties, shopping and plenty of outdoor activities for those adventure-seekers. The Division I sports add to the energy of the school and the atmosphere around campus (campus is only 30 minutes from Denver too). The school is large, with over 25,000 undergrads enrolled last year. The student body is described as "a combination of rich kids and hippies, kids who don't care about class work and kids who are super-competitive, studying hard during the week and letting loose on the weekends."
Runner-ups
2) University of Wisconsin, Madison
3) Indiana University (was number one last year)
4) University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
5) Washington and Lee University
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How about University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign? They have an excellent Electrical/Computer Engineering program. And at this point, it's probably better to get a degree with some hardware in it rather than pure software. It'll reduce the chances of being in unemployment lines. Most of the top 10-20 schools have big job-fairs with most large tech companies attending. Going to any of these schools, and getting reasonable grades should give you a very good chance of landing a job easily.
Recently, I served on a committee for our college that did some strategic planning. You know... the whole "strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats" deal.
Anyway, one of the ideas that someone brought up was the notion of trying to influence our ranking in the U.S. News annual report. So we looked into how the rankings are done.
As I recall, it turned out that the main factor in the rankings of universities as a whole was the peer assessment (other deans of universities and colleges). To this end, all of the institutions who put a priority on being near the top of the list make sure to send out promo material to everyone that U.S. News queries... ideally a few weeks before U.S. News sends out the queries, so that the promo material is still fresh in the mind of the voters.
For either the overall rankings or the rankings of the individual programs (like engineering, business, etc), there were some other very interesting quantitative measures that came into play. One of them was something like the percentage of classes with fewer than, say, 21 students (which increase a school's score) and another was the percentage of classes with more than about 35 students (which lower a school's score).
One insteresting suggestion someone on the committee made was, if we had any classes with a maximum class size of 21 or 22, lower it to 20. Only one or two students have to wait until next quarter for the class, and the college gets a discreet jump in its score. Same goes for lowering classes with a max of 35 or 36 to 34. Every little bit helps.
Anyway, the long and short of the story is that... there are a lot of clever people who make it their business to juice the scores that their school gets. If a school isn't very high on the list, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's a bad school. It might just mean that they haven't found out how the ranking game is really played. (Kinda like an athlete who doesn't realize that everyone else is using steroids yet).
In general, the best and brightest faculty in a given field are going to be primarily interested in their research. Graduate students are vital, and substantial, part of most research programs. Thus, the leaders in a field are more likely to go to an institution where they can supervise a cadre of grad students.
(Yes, there are exceptions; some brilliant professors are happy to concentrate on teaching rather than research. You'll find good examples at the institutions at the top of the list. I am speaking in general.)
Of course MIT is the best engineering school - they have the best understanding of engineers!
MIT Traditonal, The Engineer's Drinking Song, as sung by engineers worldwide.
Search for it on Kazaa, you'll find the Chorallaries excellent version.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
http://www.princetonreview.com/college/research/ra nkings/rankings.asp
And give 351 best and has feedback from students as well as schools.
That's gotta fit into your schema somewhere
These things are such a scam. Everyone should read this article.
Guess what: higher ed is expensive. I work at a very expensive private college. Assuming that you were to pay full freight for everything (few do), you would pay $11k/year less than it actually cost us to provide you the classes, services, room+board, etc.
So how do we do it? Volume! No, really we make it up by grants, donations and endowment income. The latter has been in the tank over the past few years, the former has been a lot tighter as well as all those insta-zillionaires watched their stock profits vaporize.
Cuts? Sure. My department's budget is down 25%, we're running 20% low on staff. We're under hiring freeze, we're putting off needed renovations (Library+leaky roof = bad news) we've stopped replacing computers in labs, we have cut adjunct profs and reduced the courses taught, etc, etc. And guess what: the budget still doesn't balance. We're eating our endowment to stay alive until the good times return. (And that's with the amazingly lower salaries in higher ed: you think you can get a PhD with 20 years of experience for $80k/year in industry? Our president makes a whopping $165k: a CEO of a similar sized corporation would clear a million easy.)
We're one of the lucky ones. We've got enough endowment to survive for quite a bit longer without layoffs. We even got a small raise this year.
But overpriced? No way: it just costs a hell of a lot to run a college.