The US News ranking is total rubbish. One objective data point you can use to evaluate the quality of the Chemical engineering departments is the amount of money they spend in R&D. Sooner or later, the amount of R&D will influence quality of faculty, graduate students the school can attract and the amount of impressive research it will put out and that will lead to “prestige” and name recognition down the line. R&D spending is a strong leading predictor of which schools have strong Chemical Engineering departments.
For the Last 10 years, here is the list of schools that are spending the most dollars cumulatively in Chemical Engineering Research. Dollar Values are in Millions
- UT Austin $268,111
- Georgia Tech $259,440
- MIT $258,050
- Texas A&M $166,740
- Univ of Delaware $125,910
- Univ of Col(Boulder) $117,518
- Stanford $109,635
- Wisconsin $103,432
Two notes on this list. Berkeley’s Chemical Engineering sits in its Chemistry department. So while the official Berkeley estimate is only $71M, they may be spending a lot in the Chemistry department where their R&D is really high
This list is remarkably stable. Only Purdue has cracked this list at #7 ahead of Stanford if you take into account the last 5 years of R&D spending.
If you want to get a BS in Chemical Engineering, at a reasonable cost, you can’t do much better than UT Austin and Texas A&M. Their recruitment is also really strong