Engineering Elites

College Search & Selection
1

<p>Looking for 2-3 elite schools with great engineering programs to apply to.
Opinions? Just pick your 2/3 favorite elites that would particularly suit an engineer.
Thinking Stanford and Princeton...</p>

2

<p>Nowhere near enough information to really provide recommendations, but MIT, Stanford, Princeton, UC Berkeley, Caltech, Michigan, and Cornell all come to mind.</p>

3

<p>Only criteria is elite and engineering.</p>

4

<p>Northwestern</p>

5

<p>Is Northwestern one of the better engineering schools…? I’ve totally overlooked it.</p>

6

<p>Georgia Tech</p>

7

<p>Two or three elite engineering schools?</p>

<p>MIT, Caltech and Stanford.</p>

<p>/end thread</p>

8

<p>MIT, Caltech, Stanford</p>

<p>Harvey Mudd, Berkeley</p>

<p>CMU</p>

9

<p>check out Columbia / Duke / Penn SEAS</p>

10

<p>California Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Stanford University
University of California-Berkeley</p>

<p>Carnegie Mellon University
Cornell University
Georgia Institute of Technology
University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor</p>

<p>Northwestern University
Princeton University
Purdue University-West Lafayette
University of Texas-Austin
University of Wisconsin-Madison</p>

<p>Those are the “elite”. </p>

<p>You then have universities that excel in one or two specific programs. For example:</p>

<p>Biomedical Engineering:
Johns Hopkins
Duke University
University of Washington
University of Pennsylvania
Boston University
Rice University
Univrsity of California-San Diega</p>

<p>Chemical Engineering:
University of Minnesota
University of Delaware</p>

11

<p>Cooper Union</p>

12

<p>It’s seemed to me that all these “elite” lists are heavily influnced by faculty research, which is fine. But in the metric of producing excellent B.S.engineers, schools like RPI and Cooper Union were right up there when I was practicing, years ago. Don’t know if anything’s changed, but RPI was regarded as a top engineering school then, very highly recruited. Maybe its excellent grads tended to go elsewhere for grad school, is all.
RPI was to GE as CMU was to Westinghouse, at the time. Maybe going foward the best engineering schools have to be in China.</p>

<p>From what I’ve read, seems like that Mudd place is in that position now.</p>

13

<p>^^^ </p>

<p>Yeah, RPI is better than ever. Each year recently they have set records for #applications and SAT scores. It’s elite. I’ll throw in the usually suspects of MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Gtech and CMU as well.</p>

14

<p>Cornell is definitely underrated.
I would say top 5 is

  1. MIT
  2. CIT
  3. Stanford
  4. Cornell
  5. JHU</p>

<p>Even though I love Northwestern, it simply hasn’t established itself as a top 10 engineering school yet. It only has a few specialties like Material Science…</p>

15

<p>Overall I think that elite and good engineering definitely includes: Caltech, MIT, Harvey Mudd, Stanford, Georgia Tech, Cornell, as well as most Ivy SEAS’s</p>

16

<p>Ivies, barring Cornell, are not good schools for engineering.</p>

17

<p>Princeton is almost as good as Cornell in Engineering. Columbia, Harvard and Penn are good/very good but not great.</p>

18

<p>Since there’s a chance you may switch disciplines after entering, you may want to consider a school that is strong overall, in several of the areas you are most interested in.</p>

19

<p>This is kind of a naive question. What kind of engineer do you want to be? Are you planning on a BE, an ME, or a PhD? Do you want to get a job in engineering when you graduate, and stay an engineer, or do you hope to move into management after a while? Do you have any interest in a liberal arts education, in taking any courses outside of engineering, or are you planning on immersing yourself in engineering alone? As this thread has shown, there are many, many excellent engineering schools, but they are very different in their approach to teaching the subject, their size and their focus. How do you like to study? Are you highly self-motivated, so that large classes are fine for you, or do you prefer a smaller class, in which you can work with your classmates and your professors on projects? What are your goals, your strengths, your needs?</p>

20

<p>JHU and Duke are not engineering elites overall. They are both elite in exactly one area.</p>