<p>What causes one college's engineering program to be ranked (and/or regarded) higher or lower than another college's engineering program? </p>
<p>Is it the amount of available funds for the program? or the facilities? or quality of the faculty? or quality of courses offered? is it Perception? Some other factors? </p>
<p>Also why the disparity between the different disciplines (e.g. Civil high at Univ A but mechanical lower at that same university)?</p>
<p>My S is looking at Civil Engineering and some of the schools on his list are ranked low or unranked for Civil. UConn, Temple and George Mason are three examples.</p>
<p>Depends on who is ranking it, each rag has varying criteria and ways to measure it.</p>
<p>Variations in rankings will generally be based on things like student/teacher ratio, salary after graduation, student polls, grant money received, etc. How each weights on the final score is really rather qualitative. Some ranking systems require the school to elect or even pay to be included in the survey. </p>
<p>I don’t really know about Civil, but for ChemE there are few schools that make me go “that’s a great school”, a bunch more that make me thing “that’s a solid school”, a lot that make me think “borderline engineer”, and ton that make me go “where?” This has nothing to do with rankings. If the school is respectable you’ll be fine. I doubt Temple and UConn are going deliver a bad education. Purdue on the other hand…;)</p>
<p>If we are referring to the US News rankings, I think the department rankings are done only by peer assessment. The composite rankings take into account other factors.</p>
<p>Japher, if you don’t mind sticking your neck out, and if people here can be respectful enough, would you mind sharing your opinions of which schools fall in those ChemE categories? I would sincerely be interested, excepting the case in which the “where?” school might just be one in which you have no information. I assume your categorizations are based mainly on subjective opinions but would still provide an interesting perspective and that the “great school” category is probably just the usual suspects.</p>