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MIT engineering grad school is still #1

For the 15th consecutive year, MIT's School of Engineering has achieved top ratings in U.S. News & World Report's annual ranking of America's graduate schools.

On April 7, the 2004 edition of the book, "America's Best Graduate Schools," hit the newsstands. Many of the ranking categories also will appear in the April 14 issue of the weekly news magazine, which went on sale the same day. The rankings appear online at USNews.com.

As it has for all 15 years of the magazine's survey, MIT's School of Engineering was ranked No. 1 in the nation. It also placed first in seven of 12 engineering specialties.

In business graduate school rankings of the top 50 schools in the country, MIT's Sloan School of Management tied for fourth place with Northwestern's Kellogg school.

The sciences, social sciences and humanities are not newly ranked this year; the book reprints tables of rankings completed in 2001.

Engineering

The 2004 ratings put MIT first among the top 50 schools of engineering. Also in the top five, in order, are Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Among engineering specialties, MIT was in the top seven in all 10 of the categories in which it has programs (the other two specialties were agriculture and industrial/manufacturing).

MIT was listed first in the following categories: aerospace, chemical, computer, electrical/electronic, materials, mechanical and nuclear engineering. It was third in civil and biomedical and seventh in environmental engineering.

The magazine determines rankings using five measures: faculty resources, research activity, student selectivity, and two separate measures of institutional reputation--one by engineering school deans and deans of academic affairs, and the other by corporate recruiters who hire from previously ranked programs.

MIT scored the highest possible score (5.0) in the peer assessment category and 4.8 in the recruiter assessment score.

The rankings report that Sloan graduates' average starting salary and bonus in 2002 was $101,922; 72.9 percent of graduates were employed at graduation. Ranked ahead of MIT were Harvard Business School (the top-ranked school), and Stanford University and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, which tied for second place.

In business specialties, Sloan was first in three categories--information systems, production/operations management and supply chain/logistics. It was fifth in finance and sixth in entrepreneurship.

A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on April 9, 2003.

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