thanks.
Have not attended either, but RPI is widely recognized as a great engineering school. I have never heard of Stevens. US News has RPI as top 30 engineering school, and Stevens is around 78.
You should visit each school and decide.
RPI is a better school and is more well-known than Stevens. Stevens is a nice school don’t get me wrong but you won’t have that “prestige” that some people chase.
I disagree with you. Stevens is more selective and has a curriculum with more depth and credits/subjects than RPI. The fact that Stevens ranks at third in the nation for the highest paid (starting and mid career salaries and ROI on tuition- Bloomberg Business Week/Payscale survey, “What’s Your College Degree Worth, 2015”) attests to the value that the marketplace puts on Stevens graduates. USNWR is heavily biased towards a school’s “name recognition”, which has little to do with real world capability. All engineering schools are rigorous and RPI is certainly a good school (I’ve worked with many RPI grads) but Stevens puts puts out graduates with far more depth and ability to solve problems that have multidisciplinary implications. Many engineering schools put out narrow specialists, Stevens is the pioneer in broad-based engineering training.
Stevens’ ROI is high because it has mostly engineering majors, rather than lots of biology and other majors who find lower paying jobs. The same applies to schools like SDSMT and PINYU (when it was still a separate school).
Stevens’ ROI in the group of just engineering schools is 7th in the nation in the aforementioned Payscale survey. That eliminates other majors as a variable. Stevens’ ROI is high on both measures because of the quality of its curriculum and the capability of the students.
You can argue about the academics but Hoboken is one rockin and safe town and Stevens is on the Hudson right across from Manhattan. Troy NY is grey and depressing.
Yes, impeccable academics and a great location.
What Payscale calls “engineering schools” have various percentages of engineering majors, ranging from the 20s (e.g. CWRU) to the 90s. Note that MIT grants only 39% of its bachelor’s degrees in engineering.
Stevens does have its own career survey by major. With the usual caution about comparing surveys from different schools whose survey and reporting methodology may differ somewhat, Stevens and other schools that do career surveys by major do not seem to be all that different in pay levels found by graduates in the same majors.
Stevens isn’t as engineering heavy as it once was. When I attended Stevens in the 1970s 85% of the students were in the engineering school with the remainder in physical sciences and engineering management. Today, it’s a little more than half engineering. The technology management school has significant numbers in management, economics, financial engineering, and information systems. There is a higher percentage in chemistry, physics, math, molecular biology, and math than in the past (which are the “lower paid” majors traditionally that you describe). Very notably, Stevens has introduced Music Technology and Visual Arts and Technology, and a liberal arts minor in the Arts and Letters school. Those fields are what one would expect to be “lower paid”, yet, even with those fields included Stevens graduates still stand as the 3rd highest paid in the nation across all available majors. That’s the bottom line even more significantly than the ranking in the group of engineering schools. Many visual arts, business, music, and science schools have low ROIs on their tuition. The fact that those majors at Stevens have high ROI attests that Stevens is beating traditional schools in those fields at their own game.