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.
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
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?
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
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).
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
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.
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.
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.