While I don’t really care about rankings, it caught my eye that most top schools for engineering tend to be state flagships. Is this because there are more research opportunities at larger schools? My in state is PSU which is great for engineering but I don’t think I would enjoy a school with over 40k students. I prefer smaller to mid sized schools, would that put me at a disadvantage?
To do research in engineering it takes a lot of money. So either be a large college with lots of resources, ie state schools, or very rich selective schools, eg MIT, Caltech, Stanford
You could easily find a highly regarded engineering program at a comfortably-sized (for you) university or college.
There are lots of strong engineering programs at medium sized schools (Northwestern, Case Western, Carnegie Mellon, Santa Clara) plus some LACs (Trinity).
@merc81 I know there are lots of great small-mid sized programs, but would I miss out on anything by going to a smaller school? I’ve had Bucknell in mind recently and the smaller class sizes and all professor taught classes sound very appealing to me.
Harvey Mudd isn’t…
Try getting into an honors program, that really helps.
@intparent Sure there are some amazing schools that are smaller like Harvey Mudd or Caltech, but most seem to be on the larger side like Penn State, UT, Purdue, Berkeley, UIUC, etc.
States have a vested interest in educating future eng’g students for their states.
@classof2017: You should be on solid ground at a smaller school if you would prefer that environment. Bucknell, your early choice, is notably strong. If many excellent engineering programs are in fact within large universities, this does not mean that an array of smaller schools are not also excellent. RPI and URochester are a couple of schools you could add to the other suggestions on this thread.
Rankings are largely based on research. Most students care more about placement and salaries. Many small to medium sized schools do very well in salaries and placement: Case Western, Carnegie Mellon, Lehigh, Bucknell, Cornell, Penn, Cal Tech, Columbia, Rose-Hulman.
Does anything other than being accredited matter when looking at a specific engineering department?
You are looking at the ratings of schools that grant degrees to the PhD level. That doesn’t always mean they are great at the undergrad level. Bucknell does not grant Phd’s but its ranked very highly for undergrads.
Many great schools have this in common.
Different schools may have different within-major and out-of-major elective options, even if the core curriculum for the major teaches similar principles. There can also be structural differences between how different schools teach the same material.
Some schools may have a more pre-professional emphasis, emphasizing co-ops and the such. Others may have a greater emphasis on research that can help a pre-PhD student. Of course, many schools have opportunities for both.
There are trade-offs to every decision. Larger schools have pros and cons, just like smaller schools have pros and cons. You just have to decide which place has better pros, or fewer cons, or where the pros are more important to you.
Just because a university has 40K students does not mean it feels that way. An engineering college within that 40K person school might have 5-10K students. Only half of those are undergrads. So you are looking at a school of 2500-5K students. Then segment it out by specialization and it becomes quite manageable and not much different from a smaller tech oriented school, and has the access to research.
While many schools have say mechanical engineering, they do differ in what specializations they offer, how many tech electives they have, how the non-tech electives are handled and how flexible their programs are. The non-tech parts of the schools are very different (and these can often make the male/female ratios more even or add a lot of liberal arts flavor to your education). Many of the schools have specialties, Carnegie is comp sci/electrical, Case biomedical, Texas schools petro, Minnesota/Delaware chem, etc
States have invested a lot of money and resources to have excellent engineering schools, actually most states have at least one excellent engineering program, some have several.
Other things to consider are AP credits, direct admit vs. GPA requirements to get into engineering and then location, culture (frat, partying, etc) and other typical college criteria.
Visit the various schools as well, as you can.
Class sizes can be a bit misleading, most schools will have large freshman classes for chem, calc, physics, etc. The big programs like mechanical and electrical can have a lot of students, say at Georgia Tech (2000), but other programs or smaller students could end up with only 20 graduates a year. There are ways to figure this out here on CC or through lots of google searches.
Costs also vary widely, with some schools giving good merit and financial aid, so use the net price calculators and check on merit aid %s and financial aid availability too to make your final list.
Unfortunately, attending another state’s flagship can be very costly, especially Berkeley and UMich, so your own home state is often the cheapest by 10s of thousands a year. Merit and financial aid can be sparse to rare to non-existent.
Just wanted to repeat this because it’s so important in these departmental rankings.
Re #17, However, engineering, along with business, is one of the two undergraduate programs that USNWR does specifically rank. That said, USNWR graduate department rankings pertaining to other fields do seem to be commonly misused or misinterpreted in this forum.
@merc81 Bucknell is ranked 8th with 6 ties ahead if it.
Bucknell is pretty excellent for engineering and has a much better alumni network than most schools.
This same concept is being discussed about political science and there are at least a dozen schools I can think of better at the undergrad level like Bates, ND, Villanova, Wash & Lee and diminutive St. Anselm than the schools in the list.