<p>lol...prestige does matter. When people (employers, graduate school admissions boards) know your school they give you favor. prestigious school=open doors. </p>
<p>So my rank, </p>
<p>Harvard
Yale
Penn
Princeton= sucks at everything heheheh!
Columbia
Dartmouth
Cornell
Brown</p>
<p>^^^ Penn above Princeton undergrad, huh? I take it you must be at Penn?</p>
<p>Prestige:</p>
<ol>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>Dartmouth</li>
<li>Brown</li>
<li>Penn</li>
<li>Cornell</li>
</ol>
<p>Which I think are the best in order:</p>
<ol>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>Dartmouth</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>Brown</li>
<li>Penn</li>
<li>Cornell</li>
</ol>
<p>I think the undergrad focused parts of a school (how strong the recruiting is, endowment per student, resources available to undergrads, access to professors, no TAs, no classes with over 100 students, alumni loyalty) are much more important than graduate focused metrics that bring lesser benefits (in my opinion).</p>
<p>
[quote]
If you wanna argue until you're blue in the face as to whether Harvard engineering is the fourth, fifth, or whatever best program in the Ivy League, be my guest. I spent about thirty seconds coming up with that list, and I don't claim to be an omnipotent guru regarding engineering programs, particularly the smaller ones. We all know this "Ivy ranking" game is a rather pointless exercise, and most ppl will have the exact same list, so I just threw mine out there to shake things up a bit. It was off the top of my head, based on what little I know about the programs outside of Cornell, my alma mater from way back when.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Uh, if that's your position, then why even bother putting Harvard 8th? A more conservative estimate would be to say something like 1)Cornell, 2) Princeton...and then the rest are all basically tied. There's no need to single out Harvard for supposedly being the "worst" of the 8 in engineering when in fact there is little evidence to support this, and in fact, much evidence against it. </p>
<p>
[quote]
I have no doubt that Harvard has some of the most brilliant engineering students in the country, many of which have gone (or will go) on to accomplish great things, both in and outside of the engineering fields. I myself only worked directly in engineering for about five years, though I still work with engineers on a daily basis. So I'm sure my list has some inherent bias toward those schools that produce more practicing engineers, since I have never been interested in i-banking, consulting, whatever...
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Then, by that same logic, you ought to have bias against schools like MIT, Stanford, or Caltech, all schools that produce a conspicuous number of engineers who never really 'practice'. Like I said, many engineers from these schools will become bankers or consultants. Some will go on to med school or law school or (especially) business school and become managers. Others will get PhD's and end up becoming professors or researchers (which is not really "practicing engineering" in my book). </p>
<p>The truth of the matter is, if you want to talk about schools that really produce lots of practicing engineers, you inevitably end up talking about many of the large and less prestigious state schools. I would strongly suspect that many of these schools produce far far more 'practicing' engineers than do MIT, Stanford, or Caltech. </p>
<p>The sad truth of the matter is that engineering jobs tend to be quickly level off in terms of pay and opportunity no matter how good you are. For example, take chemical engineering. No matter how good of a chemical engineer you are and how hard you work, you are probably never going to make more than 200k a year in your entire career (unless you become a manager). For example, even if you're a chemical engineer that is three times as productive as all the other chemical engineers in your firm, just for internal political reasons, you are not going to make 3 times the salary, although you deserve it. But you can easily do that, and much much more, after just a few years of investment banking, if you're a star. In other words, the pay scales in engineering are not set up to reward superstars in the way that finance pay scales are. Sad but true. </p>
<p>Don't get me wrong. I think engineering is still great for the vast majority of engineers, simply because, frankly, the vast majority of engineers are not superstars. Let's face it. If you graduate with a middling GPA from a no-name school and get a job at a no-name company, pulling in that 50k starting salary of an engineer is a quite sweet deal - almost certainly better than whatever their alternatives are. But if you're a superstar engineering student from a school like MIT or Stanford, the engineering industry is not really prepared to accomodate you properly, so you're probably going to be better rewarded by jumping to another profession. Even the best engineering employers don't pay that much more than the average engineering employer does.</p>
<p>This is how I view it:</p>
<p>Princeton
Harvard/Yale
Columbia/Brown
Cornell
UPenn
Dartmouth</p>
<p>For what its worth, here is the number of undergraduate majors recommended by "Rugg's Recommendations on the Colleges". There are a total of 85 different majors evaluated by Rugg's. Recommended schools are listed according to selectivity categories, not ranked. Smaller schools are probably not going to have as many majors.</p>
<ol>
<li>Penn 28</li>
<li>Cornell 27</li>
<li>Columbia 27</li>
<li>Harvard 27</li>
<li>Princeton 23</li>
<li>Yale 23</li>
<li>Brown 21</li>
<li>Dartmouth 20</li>
</ol>
<ol>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>DARTMOUTH</li>
<li>Cornell</li>
<li>Brown</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>Pennl</li>
</ol>