But, you can be considered a truly top university without a top Engineering program. There are quite a few of those listed here. |
No school in US News top 10 has a weak engineering program. The weakest is Yale and they're not terrible. |
My point is if you’re a top ten school, you should be close to/in the top ten in all disciplines. Harvard is not close to top ten in Engineering. Neither is Yale or Duke. |
And I just don’t think Duke outranks Brown, let alone Harvard or Yale. And it’s really just a Southern version of Northwestern; it should rank about where Northwestern ranks. |
I have a degree from there. I just don’t think that it seemed that amazing. The students were fine, but just fine. I can’t remember anyone there talking about any form of media they’d consumed outside of class, or even about doing anything interesting outside of class. So, it’s hard to see why Northwestern would outrank a place like Brown or Rice. |
How would Brown or Rice be any better? Brown aren't clear leaders in any academic subject. What was your major at Northwestern? |
I don't think you understand Duke then. Lots of people on here give it an anti-intellectual reputation (probably because of basketball) but there are many intellectually curious kids there. Duke graduates have actually have the 5th most major postgrad scholarships (Rhodes, Truman, Cambridge, Goldwater, Udall) since the 1980s only behind Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton, and 1 spot ahead of MIT. My cousin is a researcher at a major national lab and went to Duke for undergrad (and Caltech for his PhD), and he remains extremely dedicated to scientific discovery and the pursuit of knowledge |
Harvard is 27th for undergrad engineering, Duke is 16th, and Yale is 33rd. Not bad at all, especially considering Harvard has a dedicated engineering school 15 minutes across the river from it called MIT. |
“Not bad at all” doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement for an elite school. . |
Berkeley has Stanford across the bay. That doesn’t seem to affect either school in their standings. |
Yea it's not exactly comparable... you can literally walk across a bridge to get from Harvard to MIT, by car it's 3 minutes. Getting from Stanford to Berkeley by car is over an hour, and with the traffic in the area give it at least an extra 30 minutes. |
My wife went to Northwestern and her circle of friends from college are all extremely intelligent, successful, and very well-read across a truly impressive breadth. I have a hard time believing your anecdote, let alone your faux incredulity at Northwestern outranking "a place like Brown or Rice," schools that it has consistently outranked for pretty much its entire existence. |
That’s still doesn’t explain why Harvard isn’t a top school in Engineering. |
I think it’s a Northeastern troll |
| Having good engineering schools is overrated (especially for undergrads). All you really need is fairly good CS at this point. |