@theshadow & @PengsPhil - Illinois Tech is one of the [url="<a href=“http://theaitu.org%22%5DAITU%5B/url”>http://theaitu.org"]AITU[/url] schools as are RPI, WPI, RHIT, Case Western and Carnegie Mellon. The expectations of the students are at the same level as these other schools. Job placement is very good with over 94% (if I recall correctly) of our graduates finding jobs after graduation, even for my field, physics. My personal experience with my S who is a Computer Engineer was that he was able to find a job within 1 month of graduation in 2010 despite the recession. A lot of that was because of the alumni network. Companies in Chicago really like our students. The CS department is booming and the students are generally happy with the level of instruction and contact with faculty. Even though the CS Department is in the College of Sciences, it is usually straightforward to change majors to and from the College of Engineering. The number of majors is not closed.
So much for the direct answers to your questions. What follows are my reflections on rankings and why Illinois Tech is not as highly ranked as some of the other AITU schools. If you are not interested, feel free to skip it.
The reputation is often uncorrelated with the outcomes of a school. Having been at Illinois Tech for over 30 years, I have thought a lot about it. Reputation among peer schools in the US news Rankings (worth about 25% of the formula) depends on what Presidents and Provosts of other universities think of your school. With the exception of the usual suspects (MIT, CAL Tech, Carnegie Mellon, etc…), AITU schools are often underrated simply because they are small, not many Presidents and Provosts are engineers, or the research reputation is not high (also linked to small size). This persists in the disciplinary rankings which are all about reputation in a survey. In my field, physics, IIT is ranked about 140, however, if you look at the research expenditures per faculty member it is over $200,000/year which is quite solid. The problem is that we only have 16 faculty and that many of the Department Chairs and Graduate Program Directors around the country just don’t know many of our faculty members.
A second important factor in rankings is for the university to have a clear identity. This does not always have to be research oriented (RHIT, Harvey Mudd, for example) but it does have to be clear and understood far beyond the campus. This is where IIT has had a split personality for a long time. In the 1950’s and 1960’s Illinois Tech was known as the school which graduated more engineers than any other school in the country. This was because of its mission to serve first time college students in the city of Chicago. Yes, there was research but it was mostly confined to the Armour Research Foundation (later IIT Research Institute) and not well integrated with the educational part of the campus. When the new engineering campus at University of Illinois at Chicago was built, a lot of Illinois Tech’s regional student pool was no longer available and the school made a transition to being more of a national university and to building a faculty which had a research focus as well as an educational one. The cultural separation between the Research Institute and the University hindered development of the research reputation. This is still where IIT is now.
Personally, I do not mind the split personality. I like teaching and contact with undergraduates and I enjoy research and training Ph.D. students. It is, however, a difficult message to send to the outside world and is reflected in the rankings.
Especially because she would prefer Olin and MIT, though she essentially has no chance at those schools.
- though strongly trending, with an ADHD explanation. (Frosh yr was pretty much straight B’s, while Jr year GPA is 3.7 UW / 4.3 weighted.) She’ll likely have very good recs, but her ECs are rather uninspiring IMO.
