http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/engineering-no-doctorate
Harvey Mudd seems to have better quality students, lower teacher student ratio, etc etc but why does usnews rank RHIT as a better school?
For more info, both schools are pretty good engineering schools, with Rose-Hulman being larger and less selective. Harvey Mudd grads seem to get really good jobs after graduation, and some go to really good grad schools too.
Consider the breadth of RHIT’s offerings:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/19960517#Comment_19960517
Oh, who knows?
U.S. News says this about their “best undergraduate engineering” rankings:
The U.S. News rankings of the undergraduate engineering programs accredited by ABET are based solely on the judgments of deans and senior faculty at peer institutions. U.S. News surveyed engineering school deans and faculty members in spring 2016 and asked them to rate each program they were familiar with on a scale from 1 (marginal) to 5 (distinguished) for these rankings. Two peer assessment surveys were sent to each ABET-accredited engineering program…In spring 2016, of those surveyed in the group where the terminal degree in engineering is a bachelor’s or master’s, 28 percent returned ratings
This is quite possibly the least reliable way to do rankings. One single 1-5 scale ranking for each engineering program overall? Not even asking them to rank individual characteristics of the department? A person doing the rankings has no idea what factors the deans and senior faculty doing the rankings are taking into account when they make their 1 to 5 scale. They don’t know whether they’re ranking schools unfairly or in an imbalanced way, or whether they’re applying the same criteria to each school. It could even be a simple familiarity thing - more colleges may have been familiar with Harvey Mudd than Rose-Hulman, giving them more rankings and thus more opportunity to be dragged downwards. Or something else. The response rate was only 28%, which is pretty good for a mail-in survey overall but not great for a mail in survey of this kind.
There’s nothing particularly valid about these rankings. U.S. News doesn’t even give you the raw data so that you can make a determination on your own. It’s possible that Rose-Hulman was rated a 4.97286 on average and Harvey Mudd was ranked a 4.97285.
Don’t rely on the rankings. Both are excellent engineering schools, and if you prefer Harvey Mudd then you should go there.
However, this is a good time to mention that admissions rate (how “hard” a school is to get into) is not a determining factor of the educational quality of the school. There are many reasons a school may have a higher admissions rate and still be a great place. Test scores are not indicators of the “quality” of students, either.