College Factual (https://www.collegefactual.com) has WPI ranked #5 for engineering, and #2 for computer science.
https://www.collegefactual.com/majors/engineering/rankings/top-ranked/#abs5
https://www.collegefactual.com/majors/computer-information-sciences/computer-science/rankings/top-ranked/
Is this site reliable in its research and data for rankings? I am only wondering because usnews.com has a completely different list for top engineering and computer science schools.
Any ranking system must be taken with a grain (sometimes a bag) of salt. Read about the methodologies.
The college factual rankings are measuring different variables than US News.
For discussion on the College Factual rankings read https://inside.collegefactual.com/methodologies/rankings-by-major-the-quick-version For US News approach read https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-us-news-calculated-the-rankings
They are both right! It depends on what part of the data you are viewing.
This means you have more choices and you can look at the variables which are of greater importance to you. As a WPI alumnus I find graduation rates, post-grad salaries and loan default rates of serious interest as they are measuring the payoff at time of graduation. Many of the institutions on this list are not big names to the men/woman in the street or to classmates in the High School hallway.
For years the major criticism of the US News rankings were the biases generated by universities with very large graduate schools in the discipline being ranked. The largest graduate schools have built in votes from the nation’s teaching faculty by the volume of voting graduates in a voting/teaching position.
Graduates from smaller programs can also reflect very high quality.
Another measure of the WPI program that is not reflected in many of these studies is the wide variety of CS interdisciplinary options available in a medium sized University. None of these rankings really do the entire job for you.
What fits you? What do YOU care about?
Ranking systems are a function of what data they collect and value so definately take them all with a grain of salt. They can drive you nuts looking at them too much.
The college factual CS ranking looses credibility with me for many reasons but specifically when Carnegie Mellon is at #13! Their factor weighting highly takes into account graduate earnings which is significantly driven by cost of living/location (ex. people get paid more in CA and MA and cities because of high cost of living)
The collegefactual engineering rankings are suspect too. School of Mines #1 and MIT #7? This ranking is because the school of mines has 900 engineering undergrads out of 1000 students so the “major focus” criteria is skewed.
Note that usNews does not rank undergrad CS. You will need to look at graduate CS rankings to get a feel.
I agree with @BagOdonuts. The College Factual engineering ranking is wrong about Purdue which in my mind has the best hand holding/supportive engineering curriculum for undergrads and labs that are industrial sized, so full chemical engineering labs, wind tunnels, best in class aerospace labs and on and on. Purdue tests every freshman in calculus and place into the right calculus level, Purdue offers one of the best co op plans and more!
Ditto on the computer science ranking, where is UC Berkeley? Berkeley has serious CS curriculum, COPIED BY Georgia Tech !!! for the most talented and serious CS/math students in the country. They go on too earn PhDs at Carnegie Mellon, MIT etc, and most CS professionals consider that a top school.
( The fact that students take on debt is not really relevant to what is the best academic program.)
For more concrete examples of curriculum excellence: look at MIT’s mechanical engineering class 2.009
http://web.mit.edu/2.009/www/index.html
Its open to EE, CS, ME , materials scientists, etc, MIT does not limit who signs up for these cool classes!
Its called Product Engineering Processes , and it gives each small group
of students a budget, access to labs and materials and asks them to design a business plan, product and prototype, and present it to actual venture capital companies in Boston. MIT students spend 40 hours on this class per week
and its very unique and for many instructive. Some undergrads end up with funding for an idea out of this undergraduate class.
to me, MIT has the most innovative engineering curriculum in the world, yet for some reason, College Factual does not rank MIT at the top. I don’t get it.