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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][b]As a hiring manager, I do not care much about rankings.[/b] Top few might be better, but my experience is that what really matters for on the job performance -- so what I mostly care about when hiring -- are:

Which specific degree?
Which specialty within that degree?
Did the student take the rigorous upper-level in-major courses?
What concrete skills do they bring?
If they did a senior project, what was it?

ABET sets a high floor. In my experience, almost all engineering programs are rigorous. No one accidentally gets an engineering degree. It takes a lot of hard work, even for the bright capable students.

[/quote]

C'mon now.  If you work for a major engineering recruiter and I mean a real player, you know darn well there are certain schools that are targeted for recruiting because they produce the best.  If you work in the field, you already know this and the schools that are targeted.  If you work for just a company that hires engineers and not a real player,  then this might not make sense to you. I get that.[/quote]

Not our experience in the tech industry, partly because the USNWR engineering rankings prioritize several inputs that just do not correlate closely with quality.

MIT or Caltech better sure, but a[b]fter the first few, the rankings do not correlate as well as degree, specialty, and taking the rigorous electives.[/b] E&M fields will be hard everywhere. Compilers will be hard everywhere. Those rigorous courses correlate much more strongly. [/quote]

Concur. MIT/Caltech are tops but there are many others that stand out and the rigor is not the USNEws order. Rigorous programs have challenging coursework including grad level and electives as well as top-notch faculty and top notch peers. Top tech firms target certain schools and yes they do favor ivy/T20 for engineering in addition to of course the Top public E schools: UCB, GT, Michigan, UIUC. 
The ivy/top private has a real engineering school(ie they have grad students as well and they have research as well as industry involvement) with real degrees(not general engineering). Someone who has made it through Princeton, Cornell, Penn, CMU, Hopkins, Northwestern, and yes Harvard engineering with a 3.5+ is going to have had classes with more depth and faster pace than say someone who went to VCU or VT engineering. The students themselves are very different: ask any professor who has taught at different schools. When the AVERAGE engineering student has a 700 on math that is significantly different than the average student having a 780. The 25th%ile at ivy/stanford/Duke etc is 750 and the 75th is 800, of the whole school, not separating out the engineering students, and that was when tests were required. 
The quality of coursework matters and ABET is a minimum it does not require a level or depth of courses. 
The students at these schools often do real research early on and have collaboration with industry through faculty. They often take courses in sophomore or occasionally freshman year that the average E school does not take until junior year. 
This is how the students at these schools often get competitive paid summer jobs in engineering after sophomore year. 
By the first semeseter junior year when they apply for the big industry internships for the next summer, or the elite fellowhip positions, they have resumes that are just better than the average public E school. 
You can pull the lists of attendees of some of the competitive summer engineering positions, The schools above plus a couple more account for half of the attendees. The same is true for top tech jobs and top engineering phD programs: top schools are overrepresented. [/quote]

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