MIT's School of Engineering is the nation's best undergraduate engineering program overall, and seven MIT specialties were individually ranked best in the 2005 newsstand book, America's Best Colleges, from U.S. News & World Report. The rankings appear on http://www.usnews.com and in the guidebook issued Aug. 20.
The engineering specialties that gave MIT its winning sweep are aeronautics and astronautics, chemical, computer, electrical, materials, mechanical, and nuclear engineering. MIT also ranked second in the environmental specialty and fifth in biomedical engineering and civil engineering.
According to the annual guidebook, the Sloan School of Management ranks second overall among undergraduate business programs. The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania ranked first. Four management specialties within the Sloan School were ranked the nation's best: management information systems, productions/operations management, quantitative analysis, and supply chain management/logistics. The Sloan School ranked fifth in entrepreneurship and in finance.
MIT shared a three-way tie with Stanford and Duke universities as the fifth-ranked national university overall. (MIT ranked fourth last year.) The guidebook places Harvard and Princeton universities at a tie for the top rank, just as in 2003, followed by Yale and the University of Pennsylvania. Caltech dropped from fifth to eighth in the ratings.
The Institute also ranked fifth in the "best value" category, behind Caltech, Princeton, Harvard and Yale.
MIT appeared on two of eight lists of outstanding academic programs believed to improve student success--senior capstone projects that integrate and synthesize what students have learned, and undergraduate research/creative projects.
In campus diversity among undergraduates, where a rating of 1.0 is the highest, MIT's diversity index held at 0.65, the same as UCLA and St. John's University in New York. The highest rating given was 0.72, to Rutgers and the University of Houston. MIT's largest undergraduate minority group is Asian American, which make up 31 percent of the undergraduate student body. Eight percent of MIT undergraduates are international students.
To rank undergraduate business programs, U.S. News surveyed deans and senior faculty at undergraduate business programs accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. Criteria for judging schools in other categories include peer assessment, retention, faculty resources, student selectivity as gauged by acceptance rate, and class size as gauged by the proportion of classes with fewer than 20 students.
In related news, MIT was recently named one of "America's 25 Hot Schools" in the 2005 Kaplan/Newsweek guide, "How to Get into College." The guide recognizes each school for a different attribute; MIT was cited for "hottest architecture."
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on September 1, 2004 (download PDF).
