<p>OSU-Columbus College of Engineering (#26) beats the following Ivies:</p>
<p>University of Pennsylvania (#26) - <em>Tie</em>
Brown University (#35)
Yale University (#43)
Dartmouth College (#49)</p>
<p>I’m just curious to know how this is possible. How do they calculate these rankings?</p>
<p>This is for Undergraduate Engineering</p>
<p>@jefgreen: It just makes sense…most top 20-25 privates are not known for engineering (thing that feeds directly into industry), but are known for pre-professional stuff (pre-business, pre-law, and of course, pre-med) and the liberal arts (which align most easily with those standard pre-professions I mentioned, especially since there is a much lower GPA penalty). I mean, you’re comparing large schools that are necessarily training students to go on and become parts of various state industries and the like. Private schools have no theoretical obligation to do so. If the private schools had traditionally excelled in other things (such as the life and physical sciences as opposed to engineering), why would they expend an enormous amount of effort propping up a program that not many attend such schools for? Top 50 in engineering for very selective privates is not bad at all…considering the size of most of those programs. I mean, seriously, notice how the top privates in say, the top 10 are either traditionally technological/science (MIT, Caltech, and Carnegie Mellon) schools are in interesting locations (Stanford) that essentially is ripe for having an amazing engineering school. Many top privates are more liberal arts intensive or have other undergraduate (non-college of arts and sciences) entities that are still more popular or more renown than engineering (communication schools, journalism, film shools, well known visual arts programs). And again, they often make up for it in the non-engineering sciences.</p>
<p>Also, look at how well they (many private schools) do in some of the subcategories (like biomedical). No surprise that other private schools do well there (those programs benefit from the strength of the undergraduate programs in the life sciences for example). Just overall, they won’t be as robust on the whole, mainly because they typically don’t have as much breadth (as many sub-programs. Many won’t have industrial or civil for example. I don’t think all top privates have electrical either. Most great public schools in engineering have most of the engineering disciplines covered). </p>
<p>Go Bucks!</p>
<p>@bernie12: Thank you for the informative post. This makes a lot more sense to me now.</p>
<p>Ivies and liberal arts colleges do not have engineering programs because they are not purposed toward training people for specific careers. They are not vocational programs. They are more interested in cultivating students’ creativity and civic mindedness. </p>
<p>And even if OSU is ranked higher for engineering, don’t kid yourself–it’s still MUCH more difficult to gain admission to Yale or Penn or any top liberal arts school. At schools like that, you don’t apply for a specific major. You apply directly to the school itself. </p>
<p>HOWEVER … just because someone doesn’t go to a school with an engineering program, it doesn’t mean that they won’t make it in engineering or STEM. In fact, a huge percentage of people who hold PhDs in STEM actually went to liberal arts colleges. It’s thought that these schools actually give people a better “foundation” that they use to gain admission to the top PhD programs and become better scientists. </p>
<p><a href=“Small Liberal Arts Colleges and the STEM Pipeline | ACADEME BLOG”>http://academeblog.org/2014/03/31/small-liberal-arts-colleges-and-the-stem-pipeline/</a></p>
<p><a href=“http://www.cic.edu/Research-and-Data/Research-Studies/Documents/STEM-Report.pdf”>http://www.cic.edu/Research-and-Data/Research-Studies/Documents/STEM-Report.pdf</a></p>