U Chicago potentially will be the #1 most difficult school for admission this year

^nobody (myself included) applying for engineering grad school cares about this “overall” ranking. They look at department rankings instead.

The methodology is pretty flawed and I know a few schools misreported their NAE members (they included non full-time/adjunct and emeritus faculty when shouldn’t). This ranking looks legit for the top-9 but then things get “interesting” after that. USC has no department ranked in the top 10 but somehow manages to get into top-10 as a whole. Columbia, UCSD, UCLA are not all that great either if you look at their department rankings. Northwestern has two departments in the top-5 and couple just outside the top-10 but did worse than USC “overall”. Cornell definitely looks worse than what its department rankings suggest.

@Lea111 @HydeSnark would be the expert as an RA, but I think you’re probably fine. (1) I-House has a similar low-drinking culture to BJ, and I’ve heard Snitchcock has cleaned up a lot as well. (2) No dorm has Harvard-level drinking, let alone Big Ten-level drinking, and very few people outside of Greek life binge drink regularly. (3) For reasons incomprehensible to me, the large new dorms are very popular, and it might not be that much harder to get into BJ with the new policy.

As much as it warms my heart to see how Purdue stacks up against this list of very prestigious schools, it is way off topic. I want to add to @IWannaHelp and say that the ranking of the overall department also means very little in the undergrad school selection as well. Undergraduate engineering schools vary so little at the undergrad level that there is absolutely no noticeable difference between #1 and #50. In fact, one could make the argument that schools like Drexel and RIT might be better at training engineers because of their mandatory co-op program. But at the end of the day, the Indiana native that would pick MIT over Purdue for undergrad is really throwing money down a hole. Insert state public on this list vs. MIT for the same.

On an unrelated note, the FU foundation is almost as unfortunate of a name as Fuqua.

Now back to our regular scheduled programming on this thread.

Agree 100% with @BrianBoiler. Used to be that (don’t know if its still true) that the Colorado School of Mines was one of the hottest recruiting schools for engineers…why? It was a school that graduated a large number of female engineers. And the state school I went to (not on the above list) specialized in a few niche areas of electrical engineering…at the time I graduated, there were maybe a few hundred engineers in the country who specialized in this area, so finding a job was quite easy.

I’d like to edit #202 from little difference between 1 and 50 to little difference between 1 and 100. I looked at that list and there are some really good engineering schools between 51-100. Some that really popped for me in addition to the two mentioned above: Michigan Tech., WPI, and Iowa. Two of those are state publics. I’m not sure if WPI is. I know engineers from all three, have hired from two, and they are always well prepared and top notch.

In my 30 years, I’ve never met a Ivy or Stanford educated engineer. I’m sure there are good ones, but I cannot imagine they shine extremely brighter than the Big Ten trained engineers I’ve worked with (+Notre Dame, RPI, RIT, Northeastern, Drexel, MTech, even Toledo, etc.) I have worked with an extremely bright MIT degreed engineer, but he didn’t actually do engineering, but worked in venture start-ups, etc. I think he thought engineering was actually below him. Not in an arrogant sort of way, but more of a accepted fact sort of way. He also had a hard time communicating with people not nearly as bright as he was.

Just because U of Chicago doesn’t win cross admit “battle” against HYPSM does not mean its students are of less quality. Does anyone seriously believe CalTech students are of less quality? Caltech probably gets the smartest students. I put U of Chicago as top 5 smartest students.

^^We’re probably splitting hairs here, but I put UChicago as 1 or 2 smartest students.

re: #204 My husband graduated with an engineering degree from Columbia 25+ years ago, and by the time he was done with his degree he wanted nothing to do with engineering. He was even loathe to put his degree on his resume. (He went into administration, total opposite of engineering.) He, being an astute person, and also having graduated from an elite college, was able to open doors and he could have probably gotten almost any job he wanted, even if it were in engineering, no matter how bad the program. I mean, of course he was young also, so job prospects were probably easier.

Probably being bright in general, being young, and having gone to Columbia helped job prospects, no matter which field he’d decided on.

@BrianBoiler
The three oldest, private engineering institutes in the US are RPI (1824), MIT (1861) and WPI (1865) in that order. MIT is a designated “Sea Grant College,” but still private. At the time of their founding, engineering colleges were viewed as “trade schools.” The classically trained university world did not foresee the increasing academic complexity of the industrial revolution. Harvard had a very stormy relationship with this issue going back to their first engineering attempt with the Lawrence Scientific School in 1847.

Albert Einstein relegated engineering to ‘tinkering.’ (disclaimer: I heard this on a series on Einstein.)

@uocparent Personally, I put CalTech and MIT as top 2. I honestly don’t put Harvard and Stanford in top 5 in the smartest kids category. And my kid goes to Stanford. My feeling might be wrong but not biased.

@BrianBoiler I had friends who went to RPI and MIT, and on average, kids who went to MIT were smarter. Are there some kids who went to RPI who are smarter than MIT kids? Certainly.

I appreciate the search for the “smartest” students, but my experience in engineering taught me that attitude and some other intangibles were worth 20-30 IQ points

My kid also doesn’t care to go to any school where athletes are put on pedestal or treated as special, although he appreciates their skills and dedication. His high school had no THE popular kids group and neither does Stanford. Even in high school, my kid told me every kid he met had some unique skills and qualities that he didn’t have.

@uocparent

See where Einstein studied @ https://www.ethz.ch/en/the-eth-zurich.html

It was an early European “technical” university. Einstein “tinkered” with his famous thought experiments. He also needed help with his mathematics. This means there is still hope for the rest of us!

Thank goodness my son’s grade and high schools didn’t have The popular kids group or any kind of branded cliques too. They weren’t seen as any more special than kids who won awards for intellectual pursuits.

Maybe The Popular and The Cliques has gone by the wayside, in a bygone era. (Grease, anyone?)

Einstein had big help in math area from his friend who was a lot better than him in math. Einstein was good at focusing in pure thinking until he found answers. He was lazy and didn’t have good personality to get a job after PhD. Terrible father and husband also. He was able to get a divorce from his first wife by promising her he would give her the Nobel Prize monetary award WHEN, not if, he won it. It took longer than he thought, but his wife thought he would win, and Einstein did give her all the money with which she bought properties and rented them out.

@websensation I make no claims to who has the smarter kids, my claim was only that I know engineers from RPI that were very good and the only MIT engineer I know felt engineering was below him. My n=1, but I’d think being in the engineering biz for nearly 30 years, working for some fortune 50 companies that have purchased start-ups in the Bay area and the Boston area and the test of the East Coast, I’d come across more MIT engineers and Ivy engineers and Stanford engineers, and I’ve not.

I suspect it’s a vast over-simplification to say that in the mid-19th Century “engineering colleges were viewed as trade schools.” It’s true that academic colleges were increasingly focused on the PhD as a fundamental degree, and a field where PhDs were seen as superfluous did not fit the emerging academic model. But it was also a period of enormous technical innovation and vast public works, with civil engineers like John Roebling, John McClain, or Alois Negrelli serving as veritable folk heroes. And while it is true that Harvard effectively abandoned its engineering school in favor of MIT, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Dartmouth, and Cornell either began or continued engineering programs then. Stanford was an ambitious institution from day 1, and it’s very first entering class featured an engineer who went on to have a pretty interesting career – Herbert Hoover.

Whether in engineering or other endeavors, it’s surely fun to have bright people in all areas of industry.