<p>what are the best engineering grad schools in the US?
not using the USNEWS rankings...</p>
<p>grad school is far away for me, but i'm curious.</p>
<p>how is the engineering school at the university of texas? MIT's? Caltech's? Harvard's? Princeton's?</p>
<p>Actually, you will get a very solid engineering background at ANY of the top 50 according to US News... DO <strong>NOT</strong> take the numerical
ranking too seriously... but that list of 50 is a good STARTING point... you can narrow it down more based on other factors, such as particular specialty, whether you think you can get in, geographic location, etc. Lists like that should be used as just one piece of info... do not get hung up on the actual ranking.</p>
<p>The ranking of your graduate program <em>IS</em> very important, especially if you intend to go into academia with a PhD. Obviously, the quality of your research and who your advisor is matters, but in general it is very difficult to get placed into an assistant professor job with a PhD out of the top 10 or so (sometimes even top 5 for humanities).</p>
<p>im_blue,</p>
<p>it HELPS certainly to go to a top 10, but don't get carried away...
an acquaintance of mine from high school just got a faculty job at MIT coming out of Florida State with his PhD in engineering... FSU isn't even in the top 50!</p>
<p>anything in the top 50 is respectable and will give you a solid education... of course, higher ranked the better, but when comparing two schools that are separated by a difference less than 10, then other factors should come into play...</p>
<p>by the way, Princeton's engineering is well-respected... not as good as Stanford or MIT or Berkeley, but certainly solid... they are not in the top 15... yet they do quite well in academia, even in engineering...
other great schools not in the top 15 include: UCLA, Wisconsin, UWashington, Johns Hopkins, Rice, Penn State, Rutgers...</p>
<p>important caveat with these overall rankings which makes them less useful is that rankings in subfields and specialties matter somewhat more... you can have a school not in the top 20 overall, yet is in the top 5 in one or two
specialties... that is why I said lists like Us News should ONLY be used as a STARTING point... ultimately a student should consult with his academic and research advisors.</p>
<p>As an example, I took the top 20 EE departments on the US News list and tallied where their faculty got their PhDs. In almost all cases, the majority (and in some cases 70%+) of their PhDs were from the top 4 programs: MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and Caltech. There is a steep dropoff after that. For example, out of 67 MIT EE faculty, 32 came from MIT, 12 from Stanford, 9 from Berkeley, and just 14 from other places. Out of 49 Berkeley EE faculty, 11 came from Berkeley, 10 from MIT, 7 from Stanford, 5 from Caltech, and 16 from other places. Out of 43 Stanford faculty, 15 came from Stanford, 10 from Berkeley, 6 from MIT, 2 from Caltech, and 10 from other places.</p>
<p>im_blue,</p>
<p>I don't dispute the fact that if your goal is to be a professor at a top 5 engineering school, then you should try to go to a top 5 engineering school. But becoming a professor at a top 5 school involves incredible talent coupled with lots of luck. Lower down the food chain, say at a school ranked 15-30, still quite respectable, I think you will find a bit more diversity in where faculty got their PhDs. Of course, the top 5 schools will be overrepresented at even these schools.</p>
<p>
[quote]
As an example, I took the top 20 EE departments on the US News list and tallied where their faculty got their PhDs. In almost all cases, the majority (and in some cases 70%+) of their PhDs were from the top 4 programs: MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and Caltech.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Caltech is a top 4 EE PhD program? When did that happen? According to both USNews and the NRC, the top 4 are MIT, Stanford, Illinois, and Berkeley. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.upenn.edu/almanac/v42/n4/gradrank.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.upenn.edu/almanac/v42/n4/gradrank.html</a>
<a href="http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/grad/rankings/eng/premium/specialties/engsp06.php%5B/url%5D">http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/grad/rankings/eng/premium/specialties/engsp06.php</a></p>
<p>Caltech is 5th in EE for graduate.</p>
<p>But not 4th. Yet the analysis above was done using the top 4 programs. I would like to see the analysis rerun using the truly top 4 programs and see the results.</p>
<p>UIUC has 110 ECE faculty, of which 21 came from UIUC, 16 from Berkeley, 14 from MIT, 5 from Stanford, and 2 from Caltech. Note that they have a much smaller percentage of faculty from the other top programs, and that the other top programs do not have a single UIUC PhD.</p>
<p>See, Im_blue, that's what I thought was going to happen. So basically, your original top 4 was simply defined to be the top 4 at getting its graduates into faculty positions. So naturally if you define your top 4 that way, then it will obviously turn out that they will be the top 4 to get their graduates to be into faculty positions. It's nothing more than a tautology.</p>
<p>In any case, that leaves the open question that UIUC is, according to both the NRC and USNews, a top 4 program, so why is it that they seem to be notably unsuccessful in getting their grads into top faculty positions.</p>
<p>I did this analysis when entering grad school, at which time the top 4 schools did include Caltech. In any case, it's silly to quibble over "top 4" or "top 5" schools when clearly Caltech is much better at UIUC in faculty placement. My theory is that the reputation rankings reflect both quality and quantity. UIUC has five times the number of faculty as Caltech, so their research is much more visible.</p>
<p>So I think we're ascertaining that the top 4 maybe really isn't the true top 4.</p>
<p>What somebody should do is to then normalize each program by the average number of PhD's it grants per year, and then compare that to the number of graduates it can get into top faculty positions, in order to eliminate the skewing of program size.</p>