<p>Which one do you pay more attention when you choose your intended schools, between Eng rank and overall rank? Because the Eng rank is very much different when compared with the overall rank. As a result it is hard to determine which is better when one has higher rank in Eng and one is higher in Overall. What's more, apart from these two ranks, the Specialty rank in the Eng program is also a big factor. So, what's your concern?</p>
<p>I would avoid looking at the specialty rankings since many people change their minds over what kind of engineering they would like to pursue.</p>
<p>Agreed with pierre. Unless you are 150% sure you want to do a certain kind of engineering, then don’t bother with the specialty ranks too much.</p>
<p>However, between overall rank and engineering rank, far and away the more important one (if you are going to be an engineer) is the engineering rank. You might end up going to Harvard, which is the #1 overall school, but for engineering you are better off at UIUC (for example), which is somewhere around 30 overall. If you know you want engineering, then look at engineering.</p>
<p>I guess the best thing to do would be to…</p>
<p>(a) guess how likely you are to end up in any given engineering discipline, in probabilities. For instance, maybe you’re 1/2 aero, 1/4 mechanical, and 1/4 civil.
(b) next, look at the rankings for those three disciplines (in this case), and do a weighed average.</p>
<p>At least that way, you cut your losses. If you want safety, you’re going to have to pay some price in the rank of your #1 (unless all your choices are best ranked at a specific school, but the method outlined above works in that case as well.)</p>
<p>But seriously, I would recommend that you not become too obsessed with rankings. A lot of it is arbitrary… not all of it, but a lot of it.</p>
<p>Overall UG ranks go from 1 to at least 100…maybe down to the top 300 out of the thousands of schools. But even though there are only about 300+ ABET Engineering schools, the rankings usually stop at 25 or so. And many of the rankings are Graduate, not UG and could be 10 years old. You would think there would be a rank of all 300+ Engineering schools but no. You would also think there would be readily available lists dividing all 300 schools by engineering specialties.</p>