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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."
The longer I've been the workforce, the more I realize that these rankings are irrelevant except for bragging rights and being able to charge higher tuition for "prestige." I know many people who went to these great instituitions (I went to one myself) and many of them are sitting around in a dead end job boring themselves to death. Other people who went to community colleges or lower ranked schools are many of the movers and shakers of the world. There's no hard and fast rule either way regarding success and these schools. The only benefit I can see to the higher ranked schools is the networking with the elite of America who will get cushy jobs due to nepotism and that networking may pay off for you later.
Why do I h8 apple?
MIT, Stanford, Berkeley...
MIT, Stanford, Berkeley...
MIT, Stanford, Berkeley...
What exactly is this an ad for anyway? Oh yeah, US News' 'Premium Online Edition'
Nothing to see here....
Chaos, panic, disorder...my work here is done.
My comment is from the prespective of a graduate student. Almost all the top schools are as good as each other. Or you could end up with a shitty advisor in which case, any school would be bad. It might be counterproductive to choose a college based only overall rankings. Your field of reasearch, advisor, how much money they pay you as assistantship, they all play a role. As long as a school is in the top 10-20, they're probably about as good as each other.. Some better than others depending on your specialization
No "Best Party School" crap. It's a crying shame that the title exists at all.
It says a great deal about a society that values irrational consumption of alcoholic beverages as a virtue to be sought after.
And for those of you thinking that this isn't important: how many hiring managers and HR blimps do you suppose see "Bachelor of Arts" and think "drunk every weekend?" How many of those people think a college degree matters?
So yeah, it's important.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
They have absolutely no validity. Ignore them. Please.
Did any one notice this distinction:
Best Undergraduate Engineering Programs
(At schools whose highest degree is a bachelor's or master's)
(5.0 = highest)
1. Rose-Hulman Inst. of Tech. (IN) 4.4
2. Harvey Mudd College (CA) 4.2
3. Cooper Union (NY) 4.0
Best Undergraduate Engineering Programs
(At schools whose highest degree is a doctorate)
1. Massachusetts Inst. of Technology 4.8
2. Stanford University (CA) 4.7
University of California-Berkeley * 4.7
Somehow the PhD program elevates the undergrad program?
Not to mention that smaller schools don't get a fair mention in any of these round ups. If the school doesn't have tens of thousands of students, they rarely show up...
Of course I can't verify this, due to the fact that US News practically makes you pay to see how much it costs to pay to see anything more than their logo.
SuPz.orG
People often complain that these rankings are subjective. Yes, they are subjective, but so is an interviewer offering a job. I'd have to think that having clout in your own area (i.e. enrolled in a program that is rated highly by it's peer programs) would lead to clout in the job market too.
That said, I hope no one uses the list to find where they are going to apply to college. Further disclaimer: I attend Berkeley. I find it outstanding and I love it. Can't beat the crazy hippies as well as the proximity to silicon valley. (Where else can you get a top quality enginnering degree, as well as intern at Apple, among other companies, in the summer, without moving)
Lastly, Berkeley is now tied with the Farm! Moving on up. w00t!
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
From events like the ACM programming competitions, the Putnam mathematics examination, and the American Solar Challenge, I would feel confident saying that the University of Waterloo could compete with any technical school in the U.S., including MIT, Caltech, Stanford, and Berkeley.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
You sure sound middle class to me. What do you think you are?
In CS we started as Freshmen writing code and more code and even more code as you got higher up in the classes ie, 1000 level vs 2000 vs 3000. The mis folks in the college of business did't write hardly ANY code till they were Jr or Sr's. I always thought this was a bad idea since half of them ended up working as programers.
I actually knew a manager that claimed he perferred MIS grads over CS grads because they produced better 'documentation'. Which is probably true, but he got his butt canned because evey project he managed went over on time and budget by a significant margin and were usually buggy as hell, but his projects were all well documented and thats what counts right????
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
"although moreso now at the four year university I ultimately transferred into."
;))
Funny, for me, it was the opposite. After leaving a 'good' four-year (well, five, four + 1 year of internship for my program) school, I decided I might as well get an AS at least. To my eternal horror, I discovered that the instructors at the community college had something strange going for them. Most of them had worked in the field within the past decade, and thus, were able to speak reality as opposed to plain old 'book-learnin' and stuff from the days of punchcards.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they sacrificed theory for practicality. On the contrary, I was taught plenty of theory. But I was shown plenty of real world examples to back that theory up. Maybe it's just me, but writing accounting applications is somehow more "fun" than programming simulated elevators. (At least you can use the accounting apps when yer done with em.
And Java, C and C++ are infinitely more useful in the real world than 'educational programming language that no one uses #29'.
The morale of the story is, of course, pay no attention to my hillarious anecdote above, but make sure you pay attention to the following:
Ignore your parents (save for money matters), ignore your guidance counselors, ignore the campus recruiting drones. Talk to professors who actively teach courses you will be taking. Then, believe half of what they say. Follow that up with talking to actual students in the major you're considering. Believe only half of what they say.
Add up half of what the professors said, and half of what the students said, and you might actually manage to get a decent idea of what the school you're considering is actually like.
If you remember only one thing when selecting a college, remember the following: They're for-profit organizations.
"But Anonymous Coward! It says here.."
Oh, yes, I know, education and advancement of knowledge. My ass. The private schools are after your money, and the public schools are too - because if they don't get your money, the government looks at them funny and says, "Well, it appears we don't need you. Here, have some unemployment papers to fill out."
Like anyone else attempting to get your money, colleges will put quite a bit of marketing spin on their wonderful selves.
Learn how to see through it. (Now there's a skill that will serve you the rest of your life.)
After reading this, I thought "wait a minute..I just graduated from UPenn's SEAS (School of Engineering & Applied Sciences) with a BSE in CSE..it must be accredited" ...it turns out, however, that we are accredited in a bunch of engineering fields, but not computer science.
I don't know how I missed that. Doesn't seem to matter too much in the industry as far as I know...people are still getting the jobs
So just go off-campus. If memory serves, there's at least 4 other schools, including Nazareth(1:3 male:female ratio), within a fairly short driving distance.
:)
And even if you don't....People complain and complain about not finding females, but they usually turn out to be the ones that haven't ventured out of their room for anything but food or class the whole year.
Trust me, if you actually leave your cave once in a while, you'd do just fine
While I come from a family that was able to easily afford this kind of tuition 4 kids at top flight universities, I must say that this system is not even remotely fair and it is a real burden on more middle class families (including some of my friends and peers). Sure, if your parents are working near minimum wage jobs AND you meet their academic criteria (a rare group), then the system will normally cover all your expenses. However, if you are unfortunate enough to have more successful parents who spent and saved wisely, then you WILL be penalized. It is a perverse system because it penalizes thrift and rewards spending. For instance, one of my friend's parent bought a house about 30 years ago now in Seattle, while they otherwise lived very modestly, their relatively modest house appreciated in value to roughly 700K (from the 100K or so it cost before). The schools only needed to see the house to decline any substantial financial aid. The parents couldn't realistically sell short of moving to a very different part of town (not to mention leaving their friends, house, job, etc). My friend couldn't ask her parents to sell. The end result was that she was forced to attend a state school. This is perverse because her parents worked harder than most people, were more educated, etc. Meanwhile other (less capable) peers of mine, whose parents certainly earned more money than the friend I just described, but saved little, were able to enjoy substantial financial aid without their parents having to alter their lifestyle substantially.
I am sorry, but I tend to believe that we should reward hard work in this country. The system really damages that. The truth is these schools are WASTING a lot of money, some of the top schools are even charging more than they need to (but keep it high to keep their prestige and admissions in check), and then justifying it by saying that the financial aid system makes all right. Well, it doesn't. The system sucks for a lot of people. If you're rich, it's not too bad. If you're poor and you're fortunate enough to be admitted, then you're set (but also quite rare). I don't even consider myself much of a social crusader, but I truly consider it regressive, even if the pretense is "progressive". Those 2nd and 3rd generation families, whose families otherwise moved quickly up the social ranks hit an unnecessarily steep wall when it comes to entering the elite schools.
Take a look at a school like Princeton some time (if that's where you're going). Almost all the students are white and upper middle class or higher and most frankly aren't that impressive academically or otherwise. Sure, most students will have a modicum of intelligence, but more importantly they know how to work the system. If you truly leveled the playing fields economically, you'd still see a large percentage coming from more affluent families (because they are most likely to have benefited from superior educations and may even be a little smarter on average), but I assure you that you'd see a lot more kids from blue collar and clerical backgrounds. This is really not a system the delivers "fairness" OR the most capable students (because it cuts out a large percentage of students, those somewhere between rich and poor).
Real socio-economic advancement is happening, by and large, by bypassing these elite institutions entirely, by attending lesser schools (or at least less recognized ones), but nonetheless succeeding in fields that reward true hard work, skill, intelligence, and risk taking behavior (e.g., business, engineering, etc). It doesn't have to be that way and it has gotten dramatically worse over the past decade or two as tuition has climbed...
Signed,
A person who has little direct cause for complaint.
> Just want to remind everyone that a lot of the rankings are quite subjective
My alma tends to crow when ranked high and dismiss the system entirely when ranked low.
The human mind is a wonderfully flexible thing.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I don't know how it is in EE, but in medicine, NOBODY CARES where you went to medical school.
Unless you are in academics (I was for a time), where you received your medical degree is almost meaningless. Residency location matters a little more, since that's where you actually learn your trade. However, I've met people trained at Ivy-League med schools and residencies who were absolute fools; no exaggeration.
I was state-school all the way, and my USMLE and board scores were top 15% across the board... you get out of your education EXACTLY what you put into it. If you slack at an Ivy-League school, no amount of flashing around that fancy sheepskin is going to cover up the fact that you're a dolt. Also, you can be a brilliant doctor, and be as terrible as you are brilliant if you don't learn to deal with people. Nobody likes an asshole, no matter how good a doctor he's supposed to be, since medicine is far more than the mechanics (this may not be true for some surgeons. Given the choice between a prick/skilled surgeon and a nice/mediocre one, I'll take the first guy, since most of my interaction with him is while I'm unconscious. I want him for his hands, not his personality, and if he were enough of an ass, I'd tell him exactly that!)
We had guys in my medical school class who were bottom 20% in the class, and they ended up becoming GREAT doctors... the ones I would personally go to if I had a problem. One guy who went into psychiatry was dead last in the class, and went on to become an academic superstar, and professor at a large medical school.
Where you get your degree is far less important than who you are, including your personal work ethic, experience, and general motivation.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
The problem is that in my experience, colleges have typically been increasing their per student spending by _twice_ that of inflation for maybe thirty years. Caltech spent nearly $200,000 per student per year? What the HELL are they spending it on?! That has to be enough for nearly three personal tutors from your high-earn industries.
I know that a lot of stuff is expensive but then I've seen a lot of money thrown around to suit the whims of administrators and to keep the "image" up rather than focusing on education.
You mention a CEO - does your equivalent size business include students, or not? I think that is important.
Colleges don't change fast enough for USNews to sell a new issue every year unless they shake up the list themselves.
None of the factors they include have much to do with a quality undergraduate education anyway. There is an insipid tendency to judge colleges by who they admit rather than who they produce. When it comes to assessing performance after school, graduates of small liberal arts colleges outperform graduates of large, impersonal universities in almost all fields including science and engineering.
I do not condone using a single metric to judge a school's quality, but simply as an illustration here are the schools that produce the greatest number of PhDs, relative to their population size:
(Note, these are not the schools that granted the PhD, but where the PhD went as an undergraduate.) The rest of the list can be found in Loren Pope's excellent Looking Beyond the Ivy League. Points of interest from that complete list of 50 schools:
- Princeton, the most undergraduate-focused of the Ivies, is the first Ivy to make this list at #20. The next is Harvard at #37.
- Three of the Ivies plus Stanford don't even make the list.
- Only 10 out of the 50 schools have more than 2500 students (approximate; quoting from memory here).
- Many of these schools are much less selective than the Ivies, yet produce better graduates.
These results are largely the same when you look at other data: MCAT scores, med/law school admission rates, NSF grants, Nobel prizes...
Does this surprise you? It shouldn't. A university is optimized for graduate study and research. A college has no graduate school and is optimized for undergraduate education. Different tools for different jobs. This is a generalization, of course, but I hope it worries you enough to ditch US News and do some real investigation.
--
Dum de dum.
Freedom is not the license to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.
All of the sweeping generalizations you make about state universities are exactly untrue at mine*. Nearly all of my professors at least know me by name and if they don't, it's because I haven't approached them. Even a little too often for my liking, they know who I am despite my best efforts. Among my worst professors are the incredibly bright and incredibly nice type who simply can't get thoughts out of their head fast enough. All of my professors though, are very much willing to go beyond the minimum requirements to help you understand the material.
As much noise as US News makes with these ratings, what's really important is choosing the right school for your major. When I got my admissions responses back, I had cheaper options, and I had more prestigious options, but Cal Poly won out because it's the right education at the right price. (Though recent hikes are pissing me off..)
* California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo: ranked #1 "public largely undergraduate university in the West" for the 11th year in a row, which is a lot of hogwash. The more qualifiers you add, the less impressive that #1 becomes. But it really is a very good school, and I can't imagine where I'd rather go.