<p>why does US NEWS rank caltech's comp. eng. dept?
all i know is it doesn't exist. </p>
<p>caltech only has either computer science or electrical engineering.</p>
<p>That's a great question that I don't know the answer to. If I had to hypothesize it would be that the boundary between CE and EE is really fuzzy at times, and what we call "Electrical Engineering" can include things that might be characterized by others as "Computer Engineering". At the end of the day, the difference between EE and CE is relatively small, at least from the hardware side of things. If you're interested in doing software engineering primarily Caltech may not be the best place unless you like computer science (programming != CS). I wouldn't say we have a lot of courses for someone primarily interested in software engineering, CS here tends to be relatively theoretical.</p>