Slashdot Mirror
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."
No Hollywood Upstairs Medical School??? That's unpossible!
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);
according to the ads that I watch while collecting unemploymet and eating cheezits -- Devry Institue is the place to become an elite member of the exciting IT industry!!!111!!!
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.
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.
I am applying to college this fall, looking for a degree in computer engineering (or software, maybe. heh) so I can go join the rest of the madding crowd in the unemployment lines.
The portions of this report available free didn't really surprise me -- MIT and Berkeley were already on my "apply here!" list, and maybe Stanford just for fun. But I have a bunch of others in mind -- Carnegie-Mellon, Harvard, CWRU, maybe Ohio State (tuition would be cheap or free as I live in state).
This story should generate some more interesting suggestions as to what I should look into--particuarly because we have to pay money to see more than the top 3--and I'm very interested in input from the techie crowd, particularly those who have already gone through the college circus.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
I'm sorry, but I've watched far too many RoadRunner cartoons to believe a Coyote could have done better anywhere else.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
University of Colorado, isn't it?
Sadly, Chico State isn't on the list anymore. =/
Which college has the most bandwidth? The best female to male ratio?
C'mon, tell us the *important* stuff.
Forget this survey. Is there really a surprise when schools that cost $30,000 per year rank at the top? What I'm interested in is a country -vs- country ranking. Here in Canada we have some amazing universities, and I'd love to see them up against the US's best.
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
I mean they closed down the TECHNOLOGY DEPARTMENT!!! just so they could build a bigger building on campus
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
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!!!!
Princeton Review has their rankings out and there is no fee. Find out which schools are the party and non-party schools.
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?
You can see it here. Same colleges different order. ;)
No Crazy Go Nuts University?!?
I love Homsar.
"Joan of Arc, up top!" - Ghandi, Clone High
However, Stanford's Engineering department was not. The reason being is that most of the classes were taught by TA's, aka graduate students.
Stanford didn't meet the minimum requirement of actual Professors with Graduate and Post Graduate degrees teaching lectures.
With that understanding, how is it possible for Stanford to even be a top school in engineering?
The only reason I can find is that though the department may not be accredited, and that the instruction may not be from seasoned professionals, the classes taught are still of the quality you would hope from a university that used to allow students to drop classes the day before the final. (sarcastic, but also thoughtfully meaning that the instruction has improved greatly)
I know there's gotta be some other JHU alumni reading this. For years, Johns Hopkins has been ranked around #15, which always prompted Hopkins to brush the rankings aside as subjective. Surely the rankings are bullshit, they would say, since anyone worth their salt knew that JHU was the premiere research institution in the world.
:)
So my freshman year, 1999, rolls along and Hopkins finds itself ranked #7 by US News. Oh how they did celebrate. We heard about it nonstop for the first few weeks of school, especially during orientation. Major prestige thing. Huge boost to the administration's collective ego. And those rankings? Not so subjective anymore, were they? Finally those US News guys saw the light, and ranked Hopkins near the top!
Man, what a bunch of hypocrites. Long live JHU
Intercarve Networks, LLC
a popularity contest than anything useful
but the "University" I went to had to be the bottom of the barrel.
I still recall the quote from the dean of Chemistry when we walked into the 1st day of Physical Chemistry:
"None of you will pass this class the first time around, I will make certain of it."
And he did too. Had two exams, midterm and final. The midterm was on the day *after* the last day to drop the class, so in other words you had no idea how well you were doing in the class until it was too late.
Motherfucker had tenure as well, so we couldn't get his butt fired for this. And sure enough, we all failed (even the straight A students, of which I was not one)
In any case, long story short (too late!) everything I learned in life I *damn sure* didn't get at college. I got it in real life, so I have to wonder just how accurate those ratings (and how useful) really are.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Do Carnegie Mellon. Expensive and you'll bust your ass just to make a "B", but wow is it worth it. No coasting through classes here. And it actually does have a little pull out in the real world (even though right now everyone is probably saying "Mellon? Like in 'Back to School'?"). But...the thing I got most out of it, you'll make some damn good friends as you're all staying up late trying to survive.
And then you got Pitt and a couple other nearby schools to go to/recruit chicks when you have ten minutes for a social life.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Although an undergraduate degree may not get you the farthest as far as your career is concerned, the instruction you get while earning one could potentially make or break your chances at having an illustrious career. Also getting your education at an accredited school can boost your chances of getting into a good graduate program. Sure the community college can save you a ton of money, but depending on the worth of their instruction you could wind up regretting it later.
~Mike Rizzo
It is better to keep quiet and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
Mike Rizzo
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)
C'mon up to Canada for your education. The tuition is about half (or less) of what it is in the states, if you're gay you can get married, and we're about to decriminalize marijuana.
Better yet, you don't have to pay to see our rankings:
1 Toronto
2 Queen's
*3 McGill
*3 Western
5 UBC
6 Montreal
7 Alberta
8 Sherbrooke
9 Ottawa
10 McMaster
11 Dalhousie
12 Saskatchewan
13 Laval
14 Calgary
15 Manitoba
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
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).
500,000 readers, and nobody pays the Premium Subscription rate to be able to post the whole list.
People who disagree with you are not automatically evil, greedy, or stupid.
I go to RIT. I wonder why it went down.
I'd sing my school song, but we don't have one that anyone knows about.
I'd root for my football team, but we don't have one.
I'd enjoy the social life, but there is none.
I'd take a walk to the town, but there is no town in walking distance.
I'd join student government, but they're powerless.
I'd buy a soda, but they cost $1.25.
I'm in ChemE at Northwestern, and the department is very good, so I would recommend it. In terms of computers, I know a good amount of CS majors and not many like the department that much, and from what I have seen it is not that wonderful. The ECE department is good though, I know many ECE majors and some grads and they enjoy it and get a lot out of it.
And about the co-op program, I would have to say I approve; guess where I'm writing this from ;) The program here has undergone some bumps over the past years with a new director, but I would still recommend it for almost anyone in engineering.
A computer is a valuable tool, so use it and stop whining.
As far as the Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering rankings go, they've been available for a while. Note the comment on the bottom of the pages: *This ranking was computed in January of the year cited, based on data from a survey sent out in the fall of the previous year.
-- How many sigs are as useless as this one?
1(tie). Harvard University (MA)
1(tie). Princeton University (NJ)
3. Yale University (CT)
4. Massachusetts Inst. of Technology
5. California Institute of Technology
Duke University (NC)
Stanford University (CA)
University of Pennsylvania
9. Dartmouth College (NH)
Washington University in St. Louis
11. Columbia University (NY)
Northwestern University (IL)
13. University of Chicago
14. Cornell University (NY)
Johns Hopkins University (MD)
16. Rice University (TX)
17. Brown University (RI)
18. Emory University (GA)
19. University of Notre Dame (IN)
Vanderbilt University (TN)
21. University of California - Berkeley *
University of Virginia *
23. Carnegie Mellon University (PA)
Georgetown University (DC)
25. University of Michigan - Ann Arbor *
26. Univ. of California - Los Angeles *
27. Tufts University (MA)
28. Wake Forest University (NC)
29. U. of North Carolina - Chapel Hill *
30. Univ. of Southern California
31. College of William and Mary (VA)*
32. Brandeis University (MA)
Univ. of California - San Diego *
Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison *
35. New York University
University of Rochester (NY)
37. Case Western Reserve Univ. (OH)
Georgia Institute of Technology *
Lehigh University (PA)
40. Boston College
U. of Illinois - Urbana - Champaign *
Yeshiva University (NY)
43. University of California - Davis *
44. Tulane University (LA)
45. University of California - Irvine *
Univ. of California - Santa Barbara *
University of Washington *
48. Pennsylvania State U. - University Park *
Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst. (NY)
University of Florida *
51. George Washington University (DC)
Pepperdine University (CA)
53. Univ. of Maryland - College Park *
University of Texas - Austin *
55. Syracuse University (NY)
Worcester Polytechnic Inst. (MA)
57. University of Iowa *
58. Purdue Univ. - West Lafayette (IN)*
University of Georgia *
60. Ohio State University - Columbus *
Rutgers - New Brunswick (NJ)*
University of Miami (FL)
Univ. of Minnesota - Twin Cities *
64. Boston University
Miami University - Oxford (OH)*
University of Connecticut *
67. Brigham Young Univ. - Provo (UT)
Indiana University - Bloomington *
Texas A&M Univ. - College Station *
Univ. of California - Santa Cruz *
University of Delaware *
University of Pittsburgh *
73. Clark University (MA)
Michigan State University *
Southern Methodist University (TX)
Univ. of Missouri - Columbia *
Virginia Tech *
78. Baylor University (TX)
Clemson University (SC)*
St. Louis University
SUNY - Binghamton *
SUNY Coll. Environ. Sci. and Forestry *
University of Colorado - Boulder *
84. Fordham University (NY)
North Carolina State U. - Raleigh *
Univ. of California - Riverside *
87. Illinois Institute of Technology
Iowa State University *
Stevens Institute of Technology (NJ)
University of Denver
91. Marquette University (WI)
Univ. of Massachusetts - Amherst *
University of Tulsa (OK)
University of Vermont *
95. Auburn University (AL)*
University of Kansas *
University of New Hampshire *
University of Tennessee *
99. American University (DC)
Loyola University Chicago
Michigan Technological University *
Texas Christian University
University of Alabama *
University of Arizona *
University of San Diego
Washington State University *
107. Ohio University *
University of Dayton (OH)
University of Kentucky *
Univ. of Nebraska - Lincoln *
University of the Pacific (CA)
112. Catholic University of America (DC)
Colorado State University *
Florida State University *
University of Missouri - Rolla *
Univ. of
My wife used to work at a University in the Statistics/Retention/etc... or soemthing like that dept. I used to call it the Department of Imaginary Numbers. For example, when she turned the graduation report in to the Dean/board about graduation rates the #1 degree was nursing. Well, they didn't want to be known as a nursing school so they told her to break the nursing graduates down into specialties. She then asked if she should do that for the engineering/math/chemistry departments as well. The told her no, only nursing.
So much for accurate statistics! She left that job after few more reports had to be modified. For fun we called back to admissions to our old school to get the graduation rates. Scary that the same thing was going on there.
It would be interesting to see the colleges lumped together to see where the school focuses for REAL.
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
Spot on!
Another point is that the majority of community college faculty are actually interested in teaching students. Most university faculty, particularly those at the "prestigious" institutions, have absolutely no interest in teaching. They want to do research. Odds are that the undergrad classes at those top universities are being taught by graduate assistants anyway.
I've worked as an institutional research administrator for a couple of community colleges, and I've found that when community college students transfer to universities, they perform as well as or better than students who started as freshmen at the universities.
On the tuition side of things, attending a community college translates into savings sufficient to pay for the junior year at a public university.
The end result is that unless you're one of those rare /.ers that could actually get admitted to Harvard, Stanford, Princeton or MIT, you're going to attend a state university, and most state universities already have "articulation agreements" with their local community colleges to expedite transfer of credit, etc.
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
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
Princeton Review - ranks on such important catagories as "most weed" and "most hard liquor"
I have blog like everyone else
Avoid schools primarily geared towards engineering. Well, if you want to learn how to interact with real people anyway.
There are a few good reasons to go to a big state school, esp. if you have one that's decent at your intended major in your state.
1) It's cheaper. You will be very hard pressed to make enough money after school to make up for the extra $100,000 in debt you'll be from MIT or Stanford.
2) You will run into many, many more people during the rest of your life who went to your school. This is good.
3) Real people will not instantly label you as a snob.
4) You have a much broader range of educational opportunity, and employers value this. Employers want engineers who took a few humanities classes. You will enjoy the opportunity to take a few humanities classes. You will have the opportunity to apply your major to fields that are just not available at engineering oriented school.
5) If you decide you hate engineering - and I know many people who do - you can easily move into something else.
6) Social Fraternities. I'm not saying you should join one, but you should have a good friend who does.
7) Women. Who bathe. Some who have probably not heard about the tech bubble bursting and who will date you because of your perceived post-graduation paycheck.
8) You'll still have access to everything you would have had at an engineering-only school.
I know way too many people who went to Engineering schools who have a very difficult time functioning outside of an Engineering environment. One of the *MOST IMPORTANT* things I got out of college was taking classes with, and doing extra-curricular activies with, people who were smart *AND* not engineers.
paintball
These things are such a scam. Everyone should read this article.
Wait! There's less! In France you receive a salary when you make it to the top engineering school.
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.
The above post listed the rankings for Canadian medical doctorial universities instead of the rankings for universities in the comprehensive category.
ian
philcrissman.com.
"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.)
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.
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.
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.
Wow, it's weird to see Stanford and Berkely in those high spots for Engineering. Usually the top three for engineering are some combination of MIT, Carneige-Mellon, Caltech, Harvey Mudd, and Rose Hullman. (MIT being almost always #1).
We have all spent years being quantified by percentages that translate into A, B, C, D, and F and further go into a meaningless 4 point scale GPA. Does GPA measure our intelligence, our ability to perform in the "real" world, or our worth as a member of society? None of these, it simply tells how successful we will be at taking school tests in the future. Now universities are being quantified by meaningless measurements and they expect us to feel sorry for them?
Real socio-economic advancement is happening, by . . . nonetheless succeeding in fields that reward true hard work, skill, intelligence, and risk taking behavior (e.g., business . . .
The business world rewards intelligence and risk-taking behavior? My Introduction to Management textbook said, "the people who get promoted often are not the best workers, but the best politicians." In my experience, it's quite often the people who exhibit "intelligence and risk taking behaviors" are the ones who are labeled "management issues" or "not a team player" or "not a Company man" and are let go. Why? They represent a threat. No, there is tremendous pressure to get along by going along at the expense of these very attributes. All too often, this meets with disastarous results.
In case anyone has forgotten, this biased US News list was at the heart of a firestorm of criticism just a couple of years ago (let your Google fingers do the walking and you'll find plenty of citations). Some of the accusations included skewed data purposely weighted to maintain certain institutions rankings as well as the always popular bribe for ranking. Here is one I quickly found: http://aemes.mae.ufl.edu/~vql/misc/NYTimes_20Aug01 .html
Could be?! 100K in the Boston area will buy you the housing equivalent of dumpster, except nobody comes to haul it away.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
Yes, it's expensive for some, but it doesn't have to be expensive for the student as much as for the state. My education, had I not been on scholarship, would have been $3000 for year. From this, I am now in a top 5 graduate school. I graduated from undergrad in the black.
So what I learned is this: the best value is either one of the best schools in the country, or a good public school in your state. On the other hand, $25,000 for a fourth-tier private school isn't a good idea, financially.
I don't know where you're at, so that's not meant pointedly
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
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.