<p>In most engineering program rankings, princeton ranks below many state schools, as well as MIT, Stanford, Caltech, and usually Cornell as well. What is the reason for this, even though the students in princeton engineering are not any worse than these other schools, and certainly better than those at the state schools?</p>
<p>I'm considering majoring in engineering when I go to college next year, but in applications should I worry about Princeton only being ranked 11th in engineering?</p>
<p>I don't think you can make any assumptions about the students at state schools, first of all. Just because they didn't have the money to get into Princeton or fly out to Stanford doesn't mean that they're any less brilliant. State schools and the other places you named happen to have better faculty and facilities, and job placement, equaling higher ranked programs.</p>
<p>Princeton is definitely no slouch in engineering, however, ranked second behind Cornell in the Ivies for their program. If you get into Princeton engineering, be happy. The rankings are very subjective anyway, the college experience is all what you make of it, and what you make of it may differ depending on where you go to school and how happy you are. If you see yourself being happy at Princeton, then I'm sure you'll come out as a happy engineer!</p>
<p>You say state schools have better job placement than Princeton. Is that really true?</p>
<p>In terms of the engineering world, going to the engineering program at PennState and being at the top of your class will get you better job placement than from Princeton, or at least that is my firm belief backed up by employers that I know in my area (I live right by Princeton). The reason? Alumni connections. If the company is going to be hiring based on academic merit and school name alone, then they'll be hiring from MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Cornell, etc., where Princeton is lower on that list. But PennState for example has a HUUUGE alumni network that just love to hire their own, because they personally know the rigorousness of their engineering program by firsthand experience.</p>
<p>Princeton is amazing at everything, including Engineering.</p>
<p>Going to somewhere like MIT or Berekley or Penn State for Engineering means you go on to become an Engineer, doing whateever engineers go off and do.</p>
<p>Going to Princeton for Engineering means you gain the degree and connections to go out and start a corporation or business, and enter into the business world instead of the soley technologically-based world. </p>
<p>If I was accepted to every top engineering school, I'd choose princeton over all of em (personally)</p>
<p>I chose MIT over princeton, mainly because of merit and I do want to be an engineer, but also because my brother clued me into the fact that apparently the princeton engineering classes are based way off of campus and it sucks to get to any of them without a bike.</p>
<p>Just what I heard.</p>
<p>You should not be concerned about Princeton being ranked eleventh in engineering, behind 5 public schools, 3 "tech" schools (MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Caltech), Cornell and Stanford. Princeton is in the top three for overall undergraduate experience.</p>
<p>Everybody has different preferences. I would use the US News Engineering ranking as a starting point but then apply your own personal values and tastes.</p>
<p>If you want to study engineering among a well-rounded, uniformly brilliant student body immersed in a sophisticated Ivy culture, then Princeton is hard to beat. I think Princeton, Cornell, and Stanford are the best schools academically for undergraduate engineering, and I am not so sure about Stanford because of its high proportion of graduate students.</p>
<p>The public engineering universities have a different climate and culture and they have a student body that is more diverse in abilities. I also wonder about the amount of attention undergrads get from profs at the state schools. Not sure. The publics lack the prestige of the elite privates. On the other hand, the top publics have excellent physical resources.</p>
<p>MIT and Caltech (and CMU to some extent) lack the breadth of interests and curriculum that is found in the Ivies and Stanford. They seem a little too narrow in focus. On the other hand, MIT and Caltech have extremely talented student bodies and great prestige in technical fields.</p>
<p>Princeton and Cornell are intellectually lush and culturally rich environments in which to study engineering. I would choose them over any of the publics and, for most fields of engineering, over any other private engineering schools.</p>
<p>Thanks so much for the help
I feel much more comfortable in focusing on applying to Princeton, my number 1 choice. Too bad they just got rid of early action.</p>
<p>Like I said, go to some state u or berkely or MIT to become an Engineer, go to princeton to become the boss of all those MIT-Berkeley-Stanford grads. CEOs of all the big modern company founders came from Princeton, not MIT or Carnigie Mellon or Stanford or wotvr. </p>
<p>Im going to apply there next year</p>
<p>Don't know about Princeton, but generally:</p>
<p>Just because incoming students are brilliant does not mean the program offered by a school is as good as another program offered at a different school.</p>
<p>There are some programs out there that are selected by students because the overall university is highly regarded and has other programs of interest, despite the fact that the engineering program is not really top-notch. </p>
<p>I think some of the general rankings are closely related to research productivity. The way some of the smaller programs seem to get the ranking they do is they have really high quality research, but only in a few selected targeted areas. Their coverage of the field of engineering is not comprehensive, either in research or in course offerings.</p>
<p>Engineering is a broad field, and a school that does not cover the field comprehensively can cause truncation of your exposure and possibilities accordingly.</p>
<p>On the other hand, almost any program will cover the basics and offer advanced training in a number of areas.</p>
<p>Recruiting is another area where some smaller programs might suffer. Engineering recruiters want to go where they will be able to interview, and ultimately hire, a reasonably large number of qualified candidates who want to work for them. They might not bother to visit someplace which has few graduates to start, moreover they all want to go into finance, or do research, but almost none of them want to be engineers.</p>
<p>As I said I don't know where Princeton falls in this regard. But I suggest you compare factors such as: actual courses offered each semester by the engineering department, number of engineering faculty, number of areas of engineering specialization offered, number of recruiters who come to campus to recruit for specifically engineering jobs, availabilty of engineering coop programs to get exposure to actual practice, etc. I don't think the rankings you are looking at really address these factors which are actually among the most germane.</p>
<p>Regarding the state schools, some have the reputation of taking in a large proportion of in-state applicants, per their mandate, but then having huge chunks of them flunk out. This is particularly the case in engineering, and additionally huge numbers transfer out to other majors. So the actual graduates of these state U engineering programs, who did well there, are considerably stronger than the U's incoming average student profile. The engineering firm I worked for was dominated by these people, and any number of them were great engineers.</p>
<p>Tell me, if there were no rankings at all, would you rather be at Princeton or somewhere else? If the answer is Princeton, you wouldn't care about it being ranked <em>only</em> 11th.</p>
<p>I think the OP asks an excellent question. The schools ranked higher than Princeton are all outstanding research institutions with a wider range of engineering opportunities in almost every field and subfield imaginable. Princeton is a smaller engineering school with both outstanding faculty and students. They tend to have a little more of a theoretical bent because they CAN. The Princeton endowment is so huge that a theoretician can do really well there without fear of losing funding. Almost all of the Princeton engineering students I have ever met who actually went into engineering have gone on to graduate school and have been fantastically prepared for it. </p>
<p>If you can get into Princeton, I don't think you need to worry about where it is in the rankings. You may not get as many recruiters coming to Princeton because of the size of its engineering program, but if you want a job with just a BS and submit your resume almost anywhere, you will surely get noticed. I can't imagine a resume coming across my desk and thinking "no thanks, he only went to Princeton" LOL! You will also get noticed by any grad school you apply to. </p>
<p>In other words, I don't think it's a mistake to choose Princeton over somewhere higher ranked, but it's may not be a mistake to choose a higher ranked school over Princeton. Each school is a different experience and you need to decide which experience YOU want.</p>
<p>"You may not get as many recruiters coming to Princeton because of the size of its engineering program, but if you want a job with just a BS and submit your resume almost anywhere, you will surely get noticed."</p>
<p>If that's the case, it will be up to the student to do the legwork to figure out where to send the resume in the first place. Whereas there may be some other places this student could attend where more potential employers are lining up on campus to educate the students as to what the firms are like and what some of the available opportunities are.</p>
<p>I know I had not heard of my eventual future engineering employer before they came to my campus.</p>
<p>In both cases the presumably outstanding student will get a job. The exposure to what's out there before making this selection, so that such student can make the best informed decision among the most opportunities that have easily presented themselves, may not be the same though, necessarily.</p>
<p>"You will also get noticed by any grad school you apply to. "</p>
<p>No doubt. But there may be some other notable undergrad school choices that have more courses in the various sub-areas. And if you were exposed to some of these other sub-areas, that your small program doesn't even offer, maybe you would decide you want to pursue grad studies in one of these other areas instead. So breadth of course offerings scan make a difference in expanding your engineering horizons, and influence the resulting opportunities you choose to pursue. Don't know about Princeton in this regard though, I just suggest looking into it.</p>
<p>I would focus on the quality of the engineering education you will get during your four years and on the overall college experience. Recruitment is not your immediate concern. Get a fantastic education at Princeton and you will have done the right thing. Whether you go to graduate school or into a job, you'll do fine. You wouldn't want to work for a company that wasn't smart enough to recognize excellence anyway.</p>
<p>The only reason an employer wouldnt want to hire a Princeton graduate is because they know they're too good for what they're looking for.</p>
<p>Remember, employers want ppl who will do the most work for the least amount of money and with the least amount of power. Get some ppl from low-level publics, and they will do all that!</p>
<p>If I was an employer, I personally would just recruit in schools not in the top 30. Lot less costly</p>
<p>Speaking as someone who got a PhD in (electrical and computer) engineering from a top "tech" school and now works mostly in research, I can tell you that, at least for some more theoretically-oriented EE fields, Princeton is actually one of the best institutions in the US to learn "engineering science" . I don't know how that would correlate though with preparation for more "down-to-earth" engineering jobs in industry.</p>
<p>In any case, I'd ignore the US News ranking as far as Princeton engineering is concerned.</p>
<p>RootBeerCaesar, that's absurd, you are just so wrong. I see you're from New York. Maybe the Yankees should take your suggestion and fill their roster with single A minor leaguers because they're so inexpensive. I'm sure you'd rather pay top dollar for that instead of Jeter and A-Rod.</p>
<p>A talented graduate from a top school can typically can demand at most 20-40% more salary but can often deliver 100% or more output than the average engineering graduate. It's an easy call for me.</p>
<p>As others have stated, a good engineering education is worth getting in and of itself, and Princeton's faculty and student body certainly make it a great place to get one. But since so many have bought up employers, here's a list of employers who showed up to Princeton's smaller Engineering-only job fair in the fall:</p>
<p>Now, I haven't had the chance to compare the firms here with those who drop by other schools, but certainly it shows that Princeton attracts some big name engineering companies.</p>
<p>Since someone mentioned "alumni connections", I'd like to point out that that while the sheer size of Princeton's engineering cannot reasonably be expected to match that of Penn State, Princetonians have indeed ended up some high places of tech/engineering shops: Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, Meg Whitman is CEO of eBay, Eric Schmidt is CEO of Google, Lockheed Martin was headed by Norm Augustine, and the McDonnells have had a large Princeton contingent.</p>
<p>In other words, don't be scared into thinking that you won't have post-graduation opportunities.</p>
<p>Finally some facts. In my experience, engineers tend to be "where's the beef?" kind of people, so look for the beef: the facts, stripped of hyperbole.</p>
<p>So take this list and compare it to similar lists of engineering employers recruiting at: MIT, Stanford, or wherever else you are interested in.</p>
<p>Although, frankly a number of the employers on this list are financial services firms that employ about zero engineers as engineers. All depends on what you want.</p>
<p>The fact that financial services firms make up a good portion of your recruiter list gives you a hint where the Princeton engineering grads are leaning carerer-wise.</p>
<p>Amazon is the only firm on your alumni list that shows up at the career fair. Where are the others?</p>
<p>Princeton used to have a strong Chemical Engineering program. I am surprised that none of the big oil and chemical companies show up at the engineering career fair.</p>