<p>How would you rank these technological schools: Cal Tech, MIT, ITT Technical Institute, WPI, RPI, Georgia Tech, RIT, Texas Tech, Vermont Technical College, SUNY Institute of Technology, Carnegie-Mellon University, Rose Hulman Institute of Technology, Cal Poly, Virginia Tech, Louisiana Tech, Illinois Institute of Technology and Indian Institute of Technology based on public impression and the impression of recruiters and academics. I know that MIT is the best by far and that Cal Tech is probably second.</p>
<p>I know that MIT has the largest endowment followed by probably ITT with a 4.4 billion dollar market cap and CalTech with its $2 billion endowment. </p>
<p>Which schools have better practicum or co-ops and which ones have better alumni/career networks.</p>
<p>First off, ITT Tech should NOT be mentioned in the same breath as most if not all of those schools. ITT Tech is a for-profit trade school with mini-campuses all across the US.</p>
<p>The rest of them are hard to compare because of the fact that they all have such different focuses. Sure they all have engineering, but MIT is a world-class research institution and very highly regarded, while Rose-Hulman focuses on undergrad educatoin (doesn’t even have doctorates) but is still very highly regarded in its own genre of engineering education. Some of your other ones are clearly lower quality, and some of them are ones that I doubt the public knows much about.</p>
<p>I think the first thing you need to ask yourself is what are you interested in? What are you looking for in a school?</p>
<p>Just a reminder that IIT and ITT Tech are two very different schools. The Illinois Institute of Technology is non profit; a small but well respected engineering school with some real advantages. Easy to confuse the two with such similar initials. ITT Tech is, indeed, a for profit trade school and shouldn’t really be compared to the rest of these schools. It serves a different function.</p>
<p>I am not exactly looking for a school but was just curious whether people automatically thought a school was great because it is a tech school. I don’t understand why some are Polytechnic Institute, Institutes of Technologies, etc. This is kind of a dumb topic but I was just curious of whether the public is impressed by tech schools.</p>
<p>A lot of the “tech” schools previously were only for tech kind of stuff, but now most of them are more well rounded. For instance, MIT used to be almost exclusively engineering and science, yet now it has a top business school along with a host of other programs, yet retains its name. Georgia Tech is the same way, as is Virginia Tech. They really aren’t “tech” schools per se, since they have more than just technical fields. Some of the smaller schools with tech in their name are more likely to be more narrowly focused though.</p>
<p>Overall, the answer to your question is this: People are neither impressed, nor unimpressed by tech schools. The title has become less important over the years, and are more likely to be impressed with the fact that a program is known from a particular school rather than the fact that the name has “tech” in it. That would be pretty shallow if anyone just assumes that all schools like that are good are bad. Pretty ignorant too.</p>
<p>This might be a stupid question, but do the tech schools have less demanding requirements of social sciences & humanities requirements compared to liberal arts colleges?</p>
<p>I’m quite certain the OP was simply talking about the public impression of the schools. That is, after all, the title of his thread. Let’s face it - MIT has a far stronger public brand name than does Caltech. My brother graduated from Caltech, and even he freely admits as much.</p>
<p>Uh, market cap is hardly the same thing as endowment. Even if MIT/Caltech could be financially compared to ITT, a dicey proposition considering their nonpublic nature, market cap equates to the entire market value of the organization - including the real estate, the intellectual property, and the market value of the brand name - whereas the endowment is strictly about the value of an organization’s investment portfolio. Put another way, MIT’s ‘market cap’, if such a concept could really exist for a nonprofit organization, would easily be in the tens, perhaps even in the hundreds of billions of dollars when you include MIT’s prime riverfront property that overlooks the Boston skyline, the entire MIT patent portfolio, and the value of the MIT brand. </p>
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<p>Well, perhaps you could call it shallow or ignorant, but judging people by their school with little regard for program is precisely what many (probably most) people continue to do. Heck, your preceding paragraph alluded to the fact that many people don’t even know that MIT has a business school at all, much less a top ranked one. </p>
<p>I would also say that it may be entirely rational for people to emphasize general school brand name over specific program, for the fact is, many (almost certainly most) people don’t pursue careers that are related to their college major anyway. Let’s face it: most psychology majors don’t become professional psychologists, most history majors don’t become professional historians, most poli-sci majors don’t become professional political scientists. Heck, even regarding the engineering program at MIT - ranked #1 for over 20 years straight according to USNews - many graduates don’t become engineers, instead taking jobs in consulting or finance. Hence, who cares how highly ranked your particular program may happen to be if you’re not going to pursue it professionally anyway?</p>
<p>I commented on how MIT has a good business school for a totally unrelated reason to what you just said. I was commenting about how a lot of the schools with “Tech” in their name are not purely tech schools anymore. MIT, VaTech, GaTech, and all the other big name tech schools all have other programs, most of which are held in at the very least above average regard.</p>
<p>The overall point of my post was that a school having “Tech” or “Technology” or any sort of derivative of that term in its name has absolutely NO bearing on the public reputation of that school. What the school does and how it is publicized has the largest bearing on reputation. Sure, MIT has “Technology” in the name, and has probably the strongest brand power out of all engineering schools, but then you take somewhere like Berkeley or UIUC or Michigan, and they all have stronger brand power than, say, VaTech, despite the fact that it has “Tech” in the name. There really is no correlation between “Tech” being in the name and prestige.</p>
<p>“This might be a stupid question, but do the tech schools have less demanding requirements of social sciences & humanities requirements compared to liberal arts colleges?”</p>
<p>My son attends Stevens IT in Hoboken and has found the SS and humanities requirements to be quite challenging.</p>
<p>I personally attended SUNY Institute of Technology before it was a four year school - it was only upper division (Jr. & Sr. years) back then. Freshman and Sophomore work was all transfer credit. The only writing requirement for me was a “Software Documentation” class. But otherwise the requirements were equivalent to other schools, since they accepted most of the humanities and SS courses as transfer credits.</p>
<p>MIT(1), Cal Tech(4), Georgia Tech(5), Carnegie-Mellon(7), Virginia Tech(14), and RPI(23) are the top schools you listed (in the order I listed).</p>