<p>4.3 v 3.8..........................Please cite any major national firms that recruit at RPI and not PU.</p>
<p>
[quote]
RPI sends more people to top 5 or top 10 engineering schools, Purdue IS one of the top 5-7 engineering schools.
[/quote]
RPI did not send more people to the PhD programs at the top engineering schools. As Barrons pointed out, the study gellinos cited did not include any public institutions, which by the way represent more than half of the top engineering schools.</p>
<p>And Purdue is indeed recognized as one of the top 10 engineering schools in the country, long before US News started to rank colleges.</p>
<p>Both schools will give you an excellent engineering education. The choice should be based on fit. The two schools can't be more different ... Purdue is 10 times the size of RPI.</p>
<p>GoBlue81,</p>
<p>Purdue is 10 times the size of RPI.</p>
<p>does that mean also the class size is much bigger in Purdue?</p>
<p>It doesn't work that way lunnysvet, because PU probably has many more classes and majors/sub-majors offered. I would guess the intro classes are significantly bigger (something like 1.5-3 times bigger) but the last two years the difference is a lot less marked.</p>
<p>For some students, the breadth of the curriculum, departments and classes available on campus makes up for larger class sizes.</p>
<p>i know this is a very old post, but Rico2 wins this argument Calx…RPI engineering students are far better than Purdue engineering students…i have proof of this…just taking average SAT scores…</p>
<p>this came off Purdue Engineering’s website</p>
<p>“Students enrolled to the College of Engineering for 2010 had an average SAT in the middle 50% range of 1720-2010.”</p>
<p>the exact link of the website…</p>
<p><a href=“https://engineering.purdue.edu/ENE/InfoFor/FutureStudents/undergrad/FAQs/[/url]”>https://engineering.purdue.edu/ENE/InfoFor/FutureStudents/undergrad/FAQs/</a></p>
<p>now here’s RPI’s freshman class profile…keep in mind they’re only about 50% engineers, and 25% science majors…that last 25% are usually nothing worth bragging about…</p>
<p>SAT reading range: 610 - 700
SAT math range: 660 - 750
SAT writing range: 580 - 680</p>
<p>that came off this website…</p>
<p><a href=“College Search - BigFuture | College Board”>College Search - BigFuture | College Board;
<p>that’s 1850 - 2130…now lemme do this out…1850 > 1720, and 2130 > 2010…and that’s for RPI’s ENTIRE school…if you did just the engineers, it’d probably be a slight bit higher…</p>
<p>idk how the engineering rankings are determined…but i’d take those with a grain of salt…i’ve seen some cases where Purdue was higher ranked than Caltech (might have been one of those specific engineering programs)…and Caltech is Caltech…can’t really compare Purdue, or even RPI to Caltech…it’s just a whole different league…i think they put MIT to shame too…</p>
<p>bottom line is…the top students would pick RPI over Purdue…obv there’s a lot of other factors such as location and campus feel that have an impact…but…yeah…</p>
<p>For those who know RPI, they understand that it is a phenomenal engineering (and science) education, perhaps at the top of the US for undergraduates. It practically invented the category in 1824, and was the first university in the world to award a BS. It is widely respected by employers nationally. It’s graduates have achieved remarkable success and leadership in many fields. The teaching is as rigorous as MIT, and the opportunities for internships and jobs are outstanding.</p>
<p>If it were in a better city and was 1:1 in M:F ratio, it would be wildly popular.</p>
<p>West Lafayette is eh.
Troy is much worse.</p>
<p>i think if you were to make a top tier of engineering programs, RPI would be in it…probably towards the bottom of it…but yeah it’d have schools like MIT, Caltech, Olin, Harvey Mudd, UIUC, Stanford, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, UC Berkley, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Georgia Tech and RPI…</p>
<p>second tier would be schools like WPI, IIT, Rose-Hulman (they used to be better and more top tier material before but i’ve noticed their acceptance standards at least, have dropped a lot recently), NYU Poly, Purdue, VA Tech, Penn State, and RIT…</p>
<p>i think schools like Purdue, Penn State, and VA Tech get wayy more recognition than they deserve just bc they’re friggin’ huge…not to downplay their programs or anything…i’m sure they’re solid and legit too…but at least when i was applying to colleges, i never even gave those schools a single glance…</p>
<p>and lol about Troy vs West Lafayette…i wouldn’t know what West Lafayette is like but Troy has some character to it…and it’s not all that far from NYC (like 145 miles)…that’s driveable in like 1 hr 45 min i’d say…catskills and adirondacks are closeby too…</p>
<p>It’s quite pointless to try to determine a significant academic difference between these two very fine institutions. It’s like trying to rank different types of name-brand dish detergent.</p>
<p>It’s funny to read a thread that I started from 4 years ago lol
I went to RPI and graduated few months ago. I don’t regret my choice. I had great academic experience there, and got a great job. </p>
<p>By the way, Troy is much better than West Lafayette to live. Albany is 10 mins away, and both NYC and Boston are less than 3 hours away. </p>
<p>Never took classes at Purdue, so I can’t compare these two schools, but I’ve been to West Lafayette few times to visit my friends. It’s just non-sense to compare two cities lol. Troy is located at New York’s capital region, and West Lafayette is at literally middle of no where…</p>
<p>i just think that RPI engineering students are FAR better than Purdue engineering students…to get into RPI at least, you have to be pretty much close to top of the class material…Purdue not so much (based on the post i made and the evidence i showed)…</p>
<p>i, myself, am a fairly recent RPI grad (two years ago) and i just hate seeing schools with less caliber students being much higher ranked…i never even considered a lot of them when i was looking at schools…i mean state schools like UIUC, UC Berkeley, and U-Mich have students of caliber that are at the same level, if not above, the caliber of engineering kids at RPI…but schools like Purdue, Penn State, and VA Tech…definitely not…</p>
<p>another point…idk about Purdue…but RPI students, in my experience, were a lot of MIT rejects, and some that even got into MIT, but RPI gave them a lot more money…</p>