WPI Comp Sci & Engineering Rankings

Any ranking system must be taken with a grain (sometimes a bag) of salt. Read about the methodologies.

The college factual rankings are measuring different variables than US News.

For discussion on the College Factual rankings read https://inside.collegefactual.com/methodologies/rankings-by-major-the-quick-version For US News approach read https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-us-news-calculated-the-rankings

They are both right! It depends on what part of the data you are viewing.

This means you have more choices and you can look at the variables which are of greater importance to you. As a WPI alumnus I find graduation rates, post-grad salaries and loan default rates of serious interest as they are measuring the payoff at time of graduation. Many of the institutions on this list are not big names to the men/woman in the street or to classmates in the High School hallway.

For years the major criticism of the US News rankings were the biases generated by universities with very large graduate schools in the discipline being ranked. The largest graduate schools have built in votes from the nation’s teaching faculty by the volume of voting graduates in a voting/teaching position.

Graduates from smaller programs can also reflect very high quality.

Another measure of the WPI program that is not reflected in many of these studies is the wide variety of CS interdisciplinary options available in a medium sized University. None of these rankings really do the entire job for you.

What fits you? What do YOU care about?