<p>Does the uiuc engineering program compare to the likes of berkeley, stanford, and mit; or is it considered in a lower tier.</p>
<p>All are excellent programs. All have strong engineering programs. What makes them different is the course difficulty and quality of the studensts. Caltech and MIT are defintely the hardest though i can't really quantify the difficulty level. But if you go by raw combined student SAT scores (engineering) the avgs. are</p>
<p>1) Caltech 1520
2) MIT 1500
3) Stanford 1480
4) Berkeley (notsure)
5) UIUC 1330</p>
<p>As you can see, there is huge drop off in scores after Stanford. Berkeley's avg overall is only 1310 but i don't know the overall College of Engineering avg. so i didn't post it. As Bekeley Engineering is much more selective than UIUC i would assume it's somehwhere around 1450. As for UIUC, the University average is 1270 and the Engineering average is 1330. </p>
<p>Conclusions:
The best at UIUC can probably go head to head with best at Caltech, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley</p>
<p>The middle would get royally screwed at any of the other schools.</p>
<p>Read my other thread about UIUC.</p>
<p>In my opinion as a UIUC graduate and a Stanford grad student, there's a steep dropoff after the top 4 programs of MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and Caltech.</p>