NixonDenier, when it comes to resources and research opportunities, Michigan and JHU are similar. Michigan may be twice bigger than JHU, but it also has an endowment and faculty that is three times larger than JHU. So JHU does not offer students more resources.
Total students:
JHU 21,000
Michigan 43,000
Endowment
JHU $3.5 billion ($167,000/student)
Michigan $10 billion ($235,000/student)
Engineering students:
Whiting School of Engineering 3,400
Michigan CoE 9,000
Engineering faculty:
Whiting School of Engineering 250 (14:1)
Michigan College of Engineering 500 (18:1)
School of Engineering endowment:
Whiting School of Engineering $130 million ($38,000/student)
Michigan CoE $400 million ($44,000/student)
The 4:1 engineering research spending advantage over Michigan you list above is very suspicious. I would like to know how JHU came up with that number. MIT, as one may suspect, has the largest Engineering research budget in the US by a large margin, and their’s is $465 million. I doubt JHU’s Engineering research spending is double that of MIT. Let me put it another way, Engineering rankings are almost entirely proportional to research spending. If Whiting spent $860 million on engineering research, it would be far and way the best Engineering school in the nation…period. It would not even be debatable. No other university, including MIT and Stanford combined, would come close to it. It would take MIT, Cal and Stanford combined to match JHU’s Engineering research budget. Yet Whiting is seldom considered a top ten school of Engineering, BME notwithstanding.
Perhaps the $860 million figure includes all STEM research, including BME/Biotech/Medical research. The figures reported by JHU in official rankings, such as the US News graduate rankings, the Whiting School of Engineering spent $113 million in research last year. That seems a lot more realistic than the $860 million listed in your link above. Michigan’s Engineering research budget last year was $265 million (third largest among engineering programs after MIT and TAMU).
I am not sure about JHU, but Michigan has the MRC and UROP, both of which connect incoming Freshmen with faculty, usually one-on-one, from the moment they step on campus. The vast majority of incoming freshmen who request joining the MRC or UROP are assigned to a research area they are interested in.