<p>How do you select an engineering school if a student intends to get a BS in engineering and then wants to go to work? When you get into the nuts and bolt of college ratings such USWR, there is heavy bias toward graduate school. Is a BS in engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology (USNWR # 5) that much more in demand than Washington University in St. Louis, (USNWR # 43)? This is no disrespect to GT.
1. How do employers rate Engineering Schools?
2. What school is best for getting engineering ready to work in industry?
3. What school is best for job placement?</p>
<p>I’m worried about this too. I am between a no name school that is a good fit(Widerner) but also want to go to the good engineering school that would be more costly and difficult to commute to (Drexel). I’m concerned that it will be harder to get into grad school or get a job, coming from a school that is not know.</p>
<p>There’s not really a ranking of this, but a good place to start researching is the career website of the respective schools. Find out what companies recruit there.</p>
<p>Employers do not directly rank universities. Much of the university rankings you read about are somewhat bogus to begin with. Also, there are plenty of cases where a school may be ranked lower yet the school may have a program that is at the top in the rankings. For example, you will rarely find Stony Brook in the US top 10 overall rankings yet Stony Brook has one of the top Physics departments in the nation; another example is Princeton, where you might think it eschews heavily towards liberal arts yet Princeton has the top Plasma Physics department in the nation. Take rankings with a grain of salt.</p>
<p>You are better of looking at metrics such as the # of graduates that go on to find meaningful employment, the strength/reputation of a particular program, the reputation of the faculty, etc. </p>
<p>To make the point redundant, I’d rather obtain a BS in Physics from Stony Brook than from Harvard U.</p>
<p>Edit: another point worth mentioning is that if the engineering program is ABET accredited, you’ll find a similar standard level across US universities/colleges. The variations will come from the type and quality of research performed, the quality of faculty, and most importantly, the amount of $ the department pulls.</p>
<p>The questions I listed on the March 27 post were asked to a number of working engineers at a symposium. The best reply was by engineering department head, “We read the same USNR ratings as everyone else and recruit there even for the BS level.”</p>
<p>Company recruiting processes are idiosyncratic. But in general, most companies recruit from the local engineering programs, so a company in Houston will recruit from TAMU, UT-Austin, Rice, and UH, whereas someone in Orlando might recruit UF, UCF, and Miami. Most companies also recruit the schools from which influential people in the organization graduated. So if a CEO went to the Colorado School of Mines, there’s a good chance the company will go there.</p>
<p>After that, companies go to the rankings. They try to find programs that seem like a match (based on salaries and where students intend to work), and they go there to recruit. After you recruit a school, you follow some metrics, usually something like offers made / interview and offers accepted / offers made. If either metric gets out of whack, you move on to another school. You also follow graduates from those schools that you employ and track their success. If the graduates underperform, you look at another school. </p>
<p>When I went through the process, we recruited at close to every school in the country, but we targeted 15 schools using the above process (students from targeted schools were offered a higher salary, had a better chance to be hired. and received more desirable positions - more visible in the company with more upward mobility in better places to live). Every recruiting season, we usually dropped 2 or 3 target schools and added 2 or 3.</p>
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<p>That’s not true. ABET specifies the basic material to be covered, but most good schools go well beyond that level. We had an exercise almost a year ago where we pull syllabi from various engineering schools, and we found that top schools taught about 33% more material in the same class than lower tier schools.</p>
<p>I mean, think about it: if MIT and the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology taught the exact same material at the same level of rigor, wouldn’t MIT students find engineering to be easy and SDSMT students find it extremely difficult?</p>
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<p>The schools are #4 and #46. Is it that big of a difference? Is there a big difference between Berkeley and Delaware? </p>
<p>GT is a top ranked engineering schools. It is difficult to get into (average accepted GPA is 3.92 with an SAT about 2100), it places graduates in the most sought after companies around the world and in the top graduate programs. It may not have the same allure as Stanford or Harvard because it’s a public school with a 48% acceptance rate (which is because the average applicant has a 3.67 GPA and a 1941 SAT), but engineers know and respect the name.</p>
<p>"That’s not true. ABET specifies the basic material to be covered, but most good schools go well beyond that level. We had an exercise almost a year ago where we pull syllabi from various engineering schools, and we found that top schools taught about 33% more material in the same class than lower tier schools.</p>
<p>I mean, think about it: if MIT and the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology taught the exact same material at the same level of rigor, wouldn’t MIT students find engineering to be easy and SDSMT students find it extremely difficult?"</p>
<p>I think this is debatable because the goal is if the graduating engineer student knows enough to do the job.</p>
<p>Take MIT. They basically cram most schools’ Calculus I, II and III into just two Calculus courses. Now those two MIT math courses may have covered more material alone but if someone at NYU received good grades in three separate courses of Calculus I, II and III…who is to say that the MIT grad is more prepared than the NYU grad if a certain major only needed Calculus I, II and III??</p>
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<p>I guess this is where reputation comes into play.</p>
<p>“I guess this is where reputation comes into play.”</p>
<p>Maybe so…and then it would depend if pure math was needed or applied math was needed. Each school I mentioned is #1 in the respective areas of math.</p>
<p>I came across this website the other day–you might find it interesting given this thread’s topic:</p>
<p>[Best</a> Engineering Colleges By Salary Potential](<a href=“http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/best-engineering-colleges.asp]Best”>Best Engineering Schools | Payscale)</p>
<p>I’ve argued with that poor excuse of a survey at least a dozen times. It’s giving you salary information that’s self-reported and biased based on location. </p>
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<p>What class does MIT add because students get through Calculus faster?</p>
<p>"What class does MIT add because students get through Calculus faster? "</p>
<p>It’s possible that MIT may add an extra elective course for that particular major. If the MIT grad selected an elective course that was a required course elsewhere, it’s possible that both student covered the same material within the same 120 credits.</p>
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<p>G. P. Burdell nailed that one. I think that is exactly how employers evaluate schools.</p>
<p>My company announced about 18 months ago that they were going to create a ranking of schools based on their employees performance throughout their career, but they never made the list public. I have a strong feeling that the employee performance from all the larger schools (regardless of rank) would follow a bell curve.</p>
<p>Theres definitely not a one-size-fits-all answer. A good place to start would be to figure out the industries youre interested in, and from that point you can narrow down a list of schools with heavy recruiting. Like GP mentioned, a large majority of recruiting is done by geographic region. Industries also are generally dependent on their geographic location (e.g. oil on the gulf coast, manufacturing in the Midwest, high tech on the west coast, financial on the east coast, etc.) Youll find that salaries are also generally dependent on the region, and therefore the industry as well. Many highly ranked Midwest engineering schools have lower starting salaries than lower ranked east coast universities this, is not because the market values lower ranked east coast engineering programs more The bottom line is to figure out where, and what you want to do. There are good schools with lots of recruiting in nearly every corner of the country.</p>