<p>No, it means that of those who responded, 55% are employed, 31% are in graduate school, 7% are unemployed, and 7% are “other”.</p>
<p>Obviously, the limitation is that no information is available for the approximately half of graduates who did not respond; it would not be safe to assume that they are either employed or unemployed.</p>
<p>Of course, that is still better than Harvard, which does not seem to make any career survey information available in an obvious place (putting “career survey” in the search box yields nothing useful).</p>
<p>The OP said ‘engineering schools,’ not specific programs, and spoke of other engineering schools (like Rensselaer) as a whole, so my immediate thought was the overall engineering ranking, not specialty rankings. For the overall graduate one, many factors are taken into account. For the overall undergraduate one, only peer assessment is used, but the result looks virtually the same as the graduate one.</p>
<p>Note that those are international rankings that also include universities outside the United States (e.g. in Europe and Asia). You can get a sub-ranking of North American schools from the broader world ranking.</p>
<p>I don’t have any statistics, but I expect that yes, most of those who graduate with an engineering degree begin working as engineers. Some of those will eventually move into other business or marketing or management fields after having a few years of engineering under their belt. And of course, many students who start out as engineering majors, end up switching their major to something else.</p>
<p>There are a few schools where the engineering majors don’t actually end up going into engineering, Princeton for one. I was told that directly by a professor in the EE department there.</p>
<p>U.s. News is highly criticized by college presidents because of their gimmicky criteria. There patterns don’t change over the years. You can google “best engineering schools” & look for sites that do rankings by peer review. Above all, selecting an engineering school means examining how thick their curricula book is-if they don’t have the meat-then there is no muscle on the bone. Any engineering school usually will lead to the same salary & many schools offer the dual-5 yr program or 6 yr med program. Of course you also have to look at what you want as a total out of college education. Some engineering majors may want nothing but science while others might want to take say some history or a language to expand their horizons. So when the magazine ranks engineering schools it may leave out your particular goal if say you wanted also to have some diversity in your course list.</p>