<p>increasing for the past few years or so? I heard somewhere that in just a few years, it can end up coming face to face with MIT/Caltech/Stanford in terms of engineering caliber</p>
<p>It already is. It ranks like 4th (or it recently did, no less than a year ago, I haven’t and will not check for new rankings) for undergrad engineering, ahead of Caltech. Only Stanford, MIT, and Berkeley (not in that order) are ahead of it. And its individual programs are all (or almost all I guess) at least in the top 10, with many being in the top 5 (several ranking 1-3). It just isn’t private (and small) with a huge endowment, so it doesn’t get as much recognition. But with that said, level of recognition in this context sets the bar high. Employers and recruiters know Tech really well. MIT and Caltech admittedly have more rigor, however, rankings hardly care about this. If it did, Stanford would not be ahead of Berkeley, Caltech, and maybe not even Tech (even if Stanford had more rigorous content than say Berkeley or Tech, the grade inflation severely over-compensates). As for overall undergrad. rankings. These are heavily biased toward smaller, private schools. I guess for Tech to increase a lot, it would have to somehow get a much higher endowment and a lower student:faculty ration, and smaller classes (which probably means they’d have to become a larger campus or build a lot more,which isn’t necessarily good). Basically, like many of us that rank well, it would have to become more country club"ish".
However, despite the overall USNWR undergrad ranking (which hardly matters b/c Tech is pre-dominantly engineering), the actual quality of the education is probably more rigorous than most schools above it, and most employers and grad. schools know this. The perception of rigor/quality is more important to an engineering school than the USNWR overall undergrad. rankings and of course Tech is where it needs to be in engineering rankings.</p>
<p>I think you already knew this stuff. I don’t know why you started this. This would be similar to a “name 100 reasons to come to Tech” thread.</p>
<p>Bernie’s right. I have friends at MIT who’ve heard their professors say that gatech is a very competitive institution. MIT loses their accepted students to the ivies, Stanford, cmu, and gatech! No lie, I went to Vanderbilt to visit and the dean of engineering said that gatech, MIT, stanford, Berkeley, caltech, and Michigan are the leaders in engineering! I told him I was instate and thinking about going to tech and he told me I couldn’t go wrong, especially since it had higher rankings and was cheaper. Also, the wall street journal had a post that ranked GT number one for job recruits. I also looked at the graduation statistics of Carnegie Mellon alums and a nice number come to GT for their master’s and phds </p>
<p>Only a few things separate gatech from MIT: cost, public, climate, and location. Can’t beat that 
It’s called the MIT of the south for a reason</p>
<p>Hopefully it can get the reputation so MIT can be called the Georgia Tech of the north</p>
<p>Vanderbilt is only more expensive if you’re rich lol. They have great financial aid. However, they can’t touch Tech (or many other places for that matter) in engineering. At least they have it though. Vandy’s a lot like us. They really excel in life/natural sciences. I’d imagine math/physics is enhanced because of their engineering school, but it still won’t stack up to Tech.<br>
also, ambaturkey, keep in mind that MIT likely looses students to other schools because it is just plain hard (again, hate to be blunt, but it and Caltech are in a whole “nother” league of rigor, even w/comparison to Stanford, Berkeley, and Michigan). Even if it is MIT, a lower GPA from a very top school will hinder a person from getting into say, med. school, if they want whereas a person going to Harvard or Stanford/any Ivy but Princeton will have a much greater chance. I’d have to wonder if Tech’s GPA will ever catch MIT’s if the SATs/ACTs keep increasing (it would actually take quite an increase as many studies show that it takes quite a boost to show a noticeable affect/correlation on college GPA). Other than this area, it would take a lot to catch them. It would probably have to get tougher and/or emphasize innovative teaching more (for example, it’s cool how MIT has so many seminars per department that focus on a special topics area of some kind), however such techniques are harder to implement on a wide scale at a larger school. It’s actually probably why many students are willing to pursue an engineering degree at schools (many of them private of course) ranked lower than higher ranked publics. Places like Case Western, Carnegie Mellon, and Harvey Mudd come to mind. And of course you have most of the top 20s that have engineering schools attached.<br>
Tech has some sort of “strategic plan” so obviously they’re working on it. They’ll certainly go even further in the right direction (the fact that Tech has a ways to go is kind of good. It prevents complacency. We over here, have the same issue. Always improvements to be made to be more competitive with peers).</p>
<p>I just finished my freshman year at GT.</p>
<p>I met my best friend at tech
he got into Duke for Bio Med Engineering and chose Georgia Tech</p>
<p>another one of my friends got into Caltech for general engineering and chose Georgia Tech</p>
<p>another one of my friends got into MIT for general engineering and chose Georgia Tech</p>
<p>Right now I’m on a study abroad program in Barcelona Spain and met a good friend here. He got into MIT for Bio Med Engineering and chose Georgia Tech</p>
<p>I applied to all of those schools, got rejected, and would have given my left nut to go any of them but now that I’ve had some time here at Tech I’ve realized it is honestly just as good as any of the other top 5 engineering schools.</p>
<p>***none of the above had any sort of extra incentive to go to GT from scholarships or anything, all schools were essentially on an equal footing for them.</p>
<p>I would’ve gone to MIT lol. The curriculum is really good and the coursework has a different element of “challenge” to it. Plus it seems as if their natural sciences hold up extremely well too (not to say that Tech’s don’t, just that one can’t really look at chem and put it below ChemE for example as the level of the work is still very challenging) even w/relation to their engineering programs. I really like the MIT OpenCourseware thing. Though very challenging (I don’t know how to compare engineering because that’s clearly not my thing, I just compared the work in natural sciences), the content and assignments from MIT were more intellectually satisfying (problem sets were very interesting for example, really made you know and apply material in a knew context, created a thinker out of one) than a Tech counterpart (same may be observed for Caltech I guess) and of course here for that matter (though some of the bio and chem. sections of MIT seemed somewhat similar). Again, while I think all of them have awesome reputations, it seems that Caltech and MIT simply do it differently (heavy emphasis on theory at both). I suppose some may like the way they do it and some don’t, but I’m one of those academic types, so I like it despite it being absolutely brutal (I don’t know if I would be able to handle it if I went there, probably not unless I worked very very hard, but it’s still fun to take a crack at their problem sets and exams, and of course watch the lectures.)
As for incentives, regardless of scholarships, unless they were of a certain income level, Duke, Caltech and MIT were going to be expensive as hell, not to mention just hard as hell (Okay well not Duke, but MIT and Caltech, they take hard to another level far beyond GT hard. Caltech has take home exams and many of the averages still turn out low). I wouldn’t blame them for their decision. They’ll do (or are probably doing) just fine, if not better at Tech and probably pay less. Not to mention, they will almost certainly be hired upon graduation. Not really too much of a loss depending on one’s goal. Seriously, the goal of many engineers is to get a high paying job doing what they like, often right out of the BS.E program. No need to put oneself through MIT to do that. Places like Caltech in particular put more PhD types through it. So whether they are really worth it depends on the goal. A surprising amount of people at MIT end up on Wall Street anyway (or at least that used to be the trend).</p>