Last year, we wrote that the Forbes America’s Best Colleges rankings had suddenly become more friendly to public universities after several years of relegating many of them to the high three figures in the numerical rankings. In 2013, 19 public universities (not counting the military academies) made it into the top 100; but this year, that number dropped to only 14.
Worse, all but two of the 14 that remain in the top 100 lost ground, some by a large amount.
It is not unusual for anyone who ranks or evaluates colleges to make changes in their ranking methodologies. We have done the same for our next edition of the Review, although we will not be using numerical rankings this time around.
For 2014, Forbes (or rather the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP), which does the work for the magazine) has increased the weight of the student debt factor from 17.5% to 25%. At the same time, the weight for “Academic Success” went down modestly, from 11.25% to 10%. Both of these probably hurt public universities: the debt, because state support still has not caught up with costs; the academic success because CCAP counts National Science Foundation Fellowships and Fulbright awards, many of which are won by students and faculty at public research universities.
Yet here is another puzzling aspect of the rankings: the Forbes Best Value rankings, which about which we will write in a future post, list many of the same schools that dropped in the overall rankings. And student debt is a major metric in the value rankings.
At least the bizarre rankings that marked the Forbes list for the first few years have mostly gone away. No longer do we see, for example, a university ranked 320th one year and rise to 168th the next. And it is good to keep in mind that the Forbes rankings lump all private and public universities and liberal arts colleges into one huge group; so a Forbes ranking of, say, 65 or 70 for a public university is a much stronger ranking than a U.S. News “national university ranking” in the same range.
Still, it is difficult to understand how some of the public universities could have dropped so far in just one year.
Below are the Forbes rankings of public universities in the top 100, for 2013 and 2014 respectively. The first parenthesis is the 2013 ranking, and the second parenthesis is the 2014 ranking.
The 2014 Bloomberg Business Week Top Undergrad Programs list is out, and 21 of the top 50 business schools are at public universities. For the second year in a row, Notre Dame was number 1 and UVA was number 2.
Student and recruiter surveys have a major impact on the Bloomberg rankings, while the U.S. News rankings of undergrad business schools depend heavily on feedback from deans. The Bloomberg rankings can vary significantly year to year, primarily because of the responses of employers and recruiters. About 250 employers responded this year, and about 28,000 students participated, a response rate of about 33 percent.
Bloomberg considers SAT scores, student/faculty ratio, class size, internships, and hours spent on classwork to determine the academic quality of a program.
The Bloomberg rankings include test scores and, more importantly to many, median starting salaries, teaching “grade,” and placement rates. All of the top 12 programs listed below have A+ placement rates except Washington U St. Louis (A). Miami OH, Penn State, Ohio State, Georgia Tech, Michigan State, Minnesota, and Georgia also have A+ placement rates.
All of the public programs in the top 50 have median starting salaries of $50k or more, with UVA’s McIntire School of Commerce leading the way with $70,000 (tied with Penn’s Wharton School).
The latest Lumosity ranking of the smartest universities is based on more than 70,000 student results on a battery of tests designed to measure cognitive ability in the following areas: attention, flexibility, memory, problem solving, and speed. Students from more than 450 institutions participated.
Attention and memory scores correlate to a lesser extent than the other areas to SAT performance, but the other area scores correlate more closely with the crystallized math and verbal knowledge measured by the SAT. Universities had to have at least 50 student participants to qualify for consideration; therefore, small schools such as Caltech were not included. All of the top 14 schools were highly selective private institutions. The rankings vary considerably from the previous year’s rankings.
The top ten schools were Washington U; MIT; Princeton; Northwestern; Carnegie Mellon; Chicago; Rice; Harvard; Yale; and Dartmouth. The rankings include liberal arts colleges (Oberlin, Wheaton, Colgate, etc.)
Below are the 25 public universities whose students had the best overall performance on the cognitive tests, in rank order, with the overall ranking in parentheses.
We have noticed that many students apply to prominent public universities and then, almost as an afterthought, begin to wonder if the honors program at University A makes that school a better choice than regular admission to the higher-ranked University B.
A far better way to look at honors is to evaluate programs in some depth at the earliest stages of the college application process. Otherwise, students realize too late that the honors application or scholarship deadlines have already passed, or find themselves searching for anecdotal evidence with little time to spare.
Honors colleges and programs differ greatly in size, quality, curricula, housing, overall philosophy, and financial aid opportunities. Working through the maze of differences can be a daunting prospect, especially when time is an issue. When it comes to honors programs, many of the most important questions can be answered only by consideration of those all-important “details.” Below are twenty steps that should be very useful in helping you make the best decision regardless of whether you want a public or private university honors program:
1. Match basic admission requirements with your test scores, GPA, and essays.
2. Request actual average admission statistics. These may vary greatly from basic (minimum) requirements. In general, honors students will have average test scores 6-10% higher than the 25th percentile of accepted students for the university as a whole. The 25th percentile scores are available from U.S. News and other sources. If there is a wide gap between the basic and average stats, and your stats are much closer to the basic stats, then you can probably find a better option. That said, if the admissions requirements are more holistic and less stats-driven, you may be fine.
3. Determine the size of the honors program (mean size in major public universities is ~1,700, but programs may be as small as 140 or as large as 6,000).
4. Ask the fish-to-pond question: Are honors students big fish in a small pond or is the pond full of sizable fish? The more selective the university as a whole, the bigger all the fish. Some parents and prospective students might prefer an honors program that stands apart on campus, while others might like a program that is more expansive. Perhaps if you are not sold on the overall quality of the university, you might choose the former; if you think the university as a whole has a strong student body or you simply prefer a non-elitist atmosphere, then you might like the latter.
5. Assess the quality of the city, surrounding area, and climate.
6. Determine the curriculum requirements as a percentage of graduation requirements. Generally, the number of honors hours should be at least 25% of the total required for graduation.
7. Determine the number of honors sections per semester/quarter.
8. Evaluate the reputation of university in preferred or likely areas of study.
9. Ask whether there are special research opportunities for undergrads and if an honors thesis is required.
10. Ask about staff size, the number of advisers, and availability to students, as well as special freshmen orientation programs.
If the above check out, then:
1. Ask about the number of honors sections, by discipline, per semester or quarter and try to verify; determine the average enrollment in honors seminars and sections. The average class size can vary greatly among honors programs, from fewer than 10 students per class to more than 35. Most seminars and all-honors sections should have around 25 students or fewer, although in almost every case you will find that there are a few large classes, notably in first-year sciences and economics. Some honors programs have few or no honors courses in certain disciplines.
2. Ask about the types of honors sections: all-honors seminars; all-honors sections offered by honors or a department; “mixed” sections of honors and non-honors students; and the percentage of honors contract/option/conversion courses per average student at time of graduation.
Mixed sections may be small or, more often, large sections that can have more than 100 total students in 3-4 credit hour courses. Of these students, maybe 10-20 could be honors students, who then meet for one hour a week (rarely, two hours a week) in separate “discussion” or “recitation” sections. These sections can be led by tenured professors but are typically led by adjunct faculty or graduate students. Ask how many sections are mixed, and of these, ask how many of the main section classes are large.
Contract courses are regular–and often larger–sections with both honors and non-honors students, mostly the latter, in which honors students do extra work or have their own discussion sections. While most programs have some contract courses, they are generally more prevalent in large honors colleges and programs. There are advantages and disadvantages associated with contract courses. They can speed graduation, offer more flexibility, expand the influence of honors in the university as a whole, and foster contacts with mentoring faculty. But their quality and size may vary greatly.
3. Ask about tuition discounts, scholarships, continuing financial aid, including special recruitment of national merit scholars.
4. Determine if there is priority registration for honors students and, if so, type of priority registration.
5. Research the types of special honors housing for freshmen and upperclassmen, if any, including basic floor plans, on-site laundry, suite or corridor-style rooms, air-conditioning, location of nearest dining hall, proximity of major classroom buildings (especially in preferred disciplines), and availability of shuttles and other transportation on campus. If there is no special honors housing, it is often a sign that the honors program does not want to foster the big fish in a small pond atmosphere. The absence of priority registration may be an additional sign.
6. Research the study-abroad opportunities; some universities have a separate division for study-abroad programs.
7. Ask about the presence and involvement of advisers for prestigious scholarships, such as Goldwater, Rhodes, Marshall, Truman, etc., and program success in achieving these awards.
8. Ask about additional fees for participation in honors and ask about the percentage of honors “completers.” These are honors students who actually complete all of the honors requirements and graduate with some form of honors. There are many programs that have completion rates as low as 25% and a few with completion rates higher than 80%. (This is different from the graduation rate, which, for freshmen honors entrants, is anywhere from 79%–99% after six years.)
9. Now, try to assess the quality of the honors program versus quality of university as a whole.
10. VISIT the college if you have not done so and try to question current honors students. Some of the information mentioned above can only come from a personal visit or be learned after a student has been accepted.
For a while now we have written about alternative ways to view the annual U.S. News college rankings. (Please see An Alternative List of 2013 U.S. News College Rankings for an example.) Our view is that these rankings have placed too much emphasis on the financial resources and selectivity of institutions, often to the detriment of public universities. So far, the negative impact of that over-emphasis has been significant but not profound.
But for the last two years, the magazine is upping the ante–and lowering the “value” of public universities–by assigning over-performance or under-performance rankingsbased on a comparison of a given school’s undergraduate academic reputation with the magazine’s ranking. If the U.S. News rank is better than the reputation rank, then the school has over-performed relative to its reputation. If the magazine rank is worse than the reputation rank, then the school is under-performing.
The magazine’s resident number-cruncher, Robert Morse, is clear about the new analysis and its impact on public research universities:
“Many of the over-performers are relatively small research universities that grant fewer doctorates and conduct less research than others schools in their category. All the under-performers are large public universities—in some cases the top ‘flagship’ public in their state—whose academic reputation rank exceeds the performance in the academic indicators.” [Emphasis added.]
So, anyway, that’s the shot across the bow from U.S. News. Now for some facts and explanation.
U.S. News ranks universities based on “inputs” and “outputs.”The former include test scores, high school gpa, and multiple categories related to financial resources; the latter include grad rates, student to faculty ratios, and class size.The problem with the rankings is largely due to an over-emphasis on inputs.
For example, almost all leading private universities have strong financial resources, and this allows them to hire more faculty and achieve better student to faculty ratios, which in turn results in lower class sizes.So wealthy universities get credit for both their wealth (an input) and for what the wealth produces (an output).This compounds the impact of financial resources.
What works well for wealthy private universities has a compound negative effect on public universities.They are penalized for having less money, and then penalized again for having, say, too many large classes.A better system would consider only the output—the class sizes.Likewise, allocating points for high selectivity (an input) and high graduation rates (a directly related output) magnifies the mostly legitimate consideration of grad rates in favor of the most selective institutions.Yes, Harvard has a high graduation rate; but if you took students from the University of Michigan, or UVA, who had SAT scores of 2200 and higher, they would have a comparable graduation rate.
If you say, well, more money always wins out, please go to our link above. There we write that if you strip away the alumni giving, the impact of endowment, and other financial metrics and focus only on the essentials of academic reputation, graduation rates, and small classes, the publics do better overall than they do when the financial metrics and their magnifying impact are included.
There are 26 public universities among the top 50 national universities with the best academic reputations.Of these 26 public institutions, only 3 are ranked higher than their reputations, leaving 23 of the nation’s best public universities with the stigma of “under-performance.”Does this make sense to you—that academics are that wrong about their peers, while U.S. News is absolutely right?Or could the real problem be the methodology of U.S. News?
In this post, we are analyzing the Kiplinger Best Values in Public Colleges rankings for 2014 to determine which universities have improved significantly over the 2103 rankings. Improvement can mean that more financial aid is available, or that costs have been trimmed, or that quality has improved–all useful for prospective students and parents.
We like to reinforce the annual Kiplinger Best Values in Public Colleges report because of its sensible combination of cost and quality metrics based on generally sound methodology. For 2014, the emphasis on cost is 45 percent, and on quality it is 55 percent. Thus the basic Kiplinger equation is: relatively low cost and relatively high quality=”best value.”
Cost includes tuition rates and financial aid that offsets those rates to yield low net cost relative to quality. The cost metric also rewards colleges that have low student loan numbers.
The quality metric includes test scores and acceptance rates; the number of those accepted who actually enroll; student to faculty ratio; and four-year graduation rates. It is possible for a university to have a tuition increase but still rise in the Kiplinger rankings because of offsetting improvements on the quality side or an increase in financial aid.
Once again, UNC Chapel Hill is rated number 1 in best value among public universities, both for in-state and out-of-state students. The University of Virginia is number 2 in both categories, and the University of Florida is number 3 in the in-state category.
Other big news is that 26 of the public universities listed in the top 100 for best value in 2014 also improved their position by 4 or more places in just one year. Another 6 universities broke into the top 100 this year. All 32 will be in bold type below.
The universities that are new to the top 100 (versus the 2013 list) are Utah, Mississippi, Texas Tech, Georgia State, SUNY Fredonia, and SUNY Plattsburgh, all of which are now among the top 100.
These universities rose 10 or more places in 2014: Northern Iowa, Iowa State, Missouri Inst of Science and Tech, LSU, Wisconsin La Crosse, Oklahoma State, and Ohio State.
The list of the top 100 best value public universities follows, with the in-state ranking first, the out-of-state ranking next, and the increase over 2013 (in-state), if any:
North Carolina–2014 in state (1), out of state (1)
Virginia–2014 in state (2), out of state (2)
Florida–2014 in state (3), out of state (7)
William & Mary–2014 in state (4), out of state (4)
UCLA–2014 in state (5), out of state (5)
Michigan–2014 in state (6), out of state (11), +5
Maryland–2014 in state (7), out of state (14)
Wisconsin–2014 in state (8), out of state (10), +5
UC Berkeley–2014 in state (9), out of state (11)
Georgia–2014 in state (10), out of state (13), +5
New College Florida–2014 in state (11), out of state (42)
Truman State–2014 in state (12), out of state (9), +7
Washington–2014 in state (13), out of state (18), +4
UC San Diego–2014 in state (14), out of state (17)
Binghamton–2014 in state (15), out of state (4)
North Carolina St–2014 in state (16), out of state (15), +5
Texas A&M–2014 in state (17), out of state (32)
UC Santa Barbara–2014 in state (18), out of state (21)
Florida State–2014 in state (19), out of state (23), +7
SUNY Geneseo–2014 in state (20), out of state (3)
UT Austin–2014 in state (21), out of state (36), +6
James Madison–2014 in state (22), out of state (29)
UC Irvine–2014 in state (23), out of state (28)
North Carolina School of the Arts–in state (24), out of state (25)
Connecticut–2014 in state (25), out of state (22)
Ohio State–2014 in state (26), out of state (24), +11
Virginia Tech–2014 in state (27), out of state (31)
N. Carolina Wilmington–2014 in state (28), out of state (26), +4
Stony Brook–2014 in state (29), out of state (20)
Appalachian State–2014 in state (30), out of state (35), +6
Clemson–2014 in state (31), out of state (39)
Delaware–2014 in state (32), out of state (30)
Georgia Tech–2014 in state (33), out of state (46)
College of New Jersey–2014 in state (34), out of state (8)
South Carolina–2014 in state (35), out of state (45)
UC Davis–2014 in state (36), out of state (30)
Indiana–2014 in state (37), out of state (63)
Illinois–2014 in state (38), out of state (27), +5
UT Dallas–2014 in state (39), out of state (58), +21
Purdue–2014 in state (40), out of state (51), +11
Delaware–2014 in state (41), out of state (57), +5
Central Florida–2014 in state (42), out of state (60)
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo–2014 in state (43), out of state (34)
Minnesota–2014 in state (44), out of state (12)
Pitt–2014 in state (45), out of state (19)
New Mexico Inst Mining & Tech–2014 in state (46), out of state (54)
Rutgers–2014 in state (47), out of state (37)
St. Mary’s Maryland–2014 in state (48), out of state (38)
SUNY New Paltz–2014 in state (49), out of state (33)
Alabama–2014 in state (50), out of state (72)
Univ at Buffalo–2014 in state (51), out of state (47)
UC Santa Cruz–2014 in state (52), out of state (65)
Penn State–2014 in state (53), out of state (41)
Miami Ohio–2014 in state (54), out of state (48)
South Florida–2014 in state (55), out of state (55)
Iowa–2014 in state (56), out of state (86)
Wisconsin La Crosse–2014 in state (57), out of state (49), +16
North Carolina Asheville–2014 in state (58), out of state (70)
Missouri–2014 in state (59), out of state (68), +7
College of Charleston–2014 in state (60), out of state (69), +8
Mary Washington–2014 in state (61), out of state (61)
Iowa State–2014 in state (61), out of state (64), +23
Salisbury Md.–2014 in state (62), out of state (44), +9
Northern Florida–2014 in state (63), out of state (64)
Oklahoma–2014 in state (64), out of state (71), +5
Ramapo–2014 in state (65), out of state (43)
Arkansas–2014 in state (67), out of state (79)
Tennessee–2014 in state (68), out of state (82)
Utah–2014 in state (69), out of state (96), not in top 100 in 2013
Mass Amherst–2014 in state (70), out of state (53)
Northern Iowa–2014 in state (71), out of state (80), +24
George Mason–2014 in state (72), out of state (90)
LSU–2014 in state (73), out of state (99), +17
SUNY Oneonta–2014 in state (74), out of state (52)
Vermont–2014 in state (75), out of state (75)
San Diego State–2014 in state (76), out of state (66)
West Chester–2014 in state (77), out of state (62)
Mississippi–2014 in state (78), out of state (84), not in top 100 in 2013
Oklahoma State–2014 in state (79), out of state (88), +14
Auburn–2014 in state (80), out of state (85)
M0. Inst Science & Tech–2014 in state (81), out of state (81), not in top 100 2013
Colorado School of Mines–2014 in state (82), out of state (82)
Nebraska–2014 in state (83), out of state (89)
Christopher Newport–2014 in state (84), out of state (56)
Univ of Science & Arts Okla–2014 in state (85), out of state (83), +6
Towson State–2014 in state (86), out of state (73)
Texas Tech–2014 in state (87), out of state (91), not in top 100 in 2013
Maryland Balt County–2014 in state (88), out of state (77)
SUNY Purchase–2014 in state (89), out of state (59)
Colorado–2014 in state (90), out of state (98)
Minnesota Morris–2014 in state (91), out of state (50)
Cal State Long Beach–2014 in state (92), out of state (87)
Western Washington–2014 in state (93), out of state (74)
Univ of North Georgia–2014 in state (94), out of state (94)
Georgia St. Col & Univ–2014 in state (95), out of state (97), not in top 100 in 2013
Cal St Poly Pomona–2014 in state (96), out of state (93)
SUNY Fredonia–2014 in state (97), out of state (67), not in top 100 in 2013
SUNY Plattsburgh–2014 in state (98), out of state (78), not in top 100 in 2013
UC Riverside–2014 in state (99), out of state (95)
Although the annual U.S. News college rankings are a cause of considerable controversy, the magazine is a source of excellent information. One useful metric is that for freshman retention–the percentage of entering freshmen who return for the sophomore year.
The freshman retention rate can be somewhat misleading, however, because many of the leading universities also have the most selective admissions requirements, making academic success much more likely. Another reason the rate can be misleading is that the nation’s elite private universities not only have the highest-qualified students, as measure by test scores and high school gpa’s, but also provide generous financial support that makes it unnecessary for students to work or drop out of school.
Yet this makes high freshman retention rates in public universities all the more impressive, especially when some of these schools achieve high retention rates even though they are not among the most selective in their admissions. (This is especially so when tuition, fees, and cost of living are above average.) Delaware, Michigan State, Penn State, Pitt, Ohio State, UC Santa Cruz, and Washington are examples. Florida and Florida State also have impressive retention rates, but they also offer strong academics along with very low tuition costs.
Below please see the list of the public universities with the best freshman retention rates. We will list the retention percentage, followed by the percentage of students accepted.
We have completed an analysis of academic departmental rankings published by U.S. News, and one result may be a surprise: of the top 56 universities with the best academic departments, 34 are public. After the top dozen or so universities, including familiar names such as Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, the list is dominated by public institutions.
Part of the reason is that the public universities below are leading research institutions, while a few of the elite private schools that show up in the top 25 of the U.S. News rankings are not really research-intensive. Examples are Dartmouth, Georgetown, and Notre Dame. Yet most of the other elite private schools do have a research focus along with many respected graduate courses of study.
Prospective honors students, more than most other students who are considering college, should pay close attention to the rankings of the academic departments in the schools they are considering. Why do we believe that this is so?
1. As the somewhat surprising departmental statistics below demonstrate, some of the strongest academic departments in the nation are at public research universities, where the disadvantages of large schools are mitigated by offering honors students relatively small honors communities and classes.
2. Conventional national college rankings often emphasize financial resources, selectivity, small class size, and graduation rates to the point that the actual quality of academic departments can be obscured. But public university honors students typically have smaller classes and much higher graduation rates than those for the university as a whole.
3. Honors students interested in post-graduate research options should know that there is a strong correlation between highly-rated academic departments and the number of National Science Graduate Research Grants as well as the number of Fulbright Student awards. Both of these awards are allied with careers in research and academe.
4. Strong academic departments and an emphasis on undergraduate research, which is often a component of honors programs, also promotes high achievement in earning undergraduate awards, such as Goldwater scholarships.
Having listed the points we above, we also advise prospective honors students to ask honors staff about the reach of the honors curriculum and whether the best professors in strong academic departments are available to teach at least upper-division honors sections.
The departmental rankings below may include up to 15 departments from each university: undergraduate business, undergraduate engineering, and graduate rankings for biological sciences, chemistry, computer science, earth science, economics, education, English, history, math, physics, political science, psychology, and sociology.
Universities whose stats do not include all 15 of the departments above may not do so because (1) they might not offer undergraduate or graduate degrees in the subject (e.g., business, education, engineering); or (2) the ranking of the department is in the lower third of the rankings and are not listed at all.
On the left is the cumulative ranking of academic departments, by institution. Next we list the number of departments included in the analysis. Then the actual rating is listed, with, for example, the 2.71 rating for Stanford indicating that of the 14 ranked departments, the overall average was 2.71 on a scale of 1 to 200, with 1 being the best national ranking a department can receive. Thus the “average” department at Stanford is in the top 3 nationally. The final listing is the 2014 U.S. News rank of the university as a whole. Please note that if you are a student of the U.S. News rankings, the cumulative academic department rating is not the same as the “peer assessment” used in the rankings, though there is some correlation. Public universities are in bold type.
We continue to enjoy writing about the Times Higher Ed World Rankings because unlike most U.S. ranking publications and the current trend of disparaging academic research at public institutions, the Times rankings embrace research as “the single most influential of the 13 indicators,” as the Times “looks at the role of universities in spreading new knowledge and ideas.”
Note: Because research, as measured by publications, can vary significantly from year to year, there is more fluidity in the Times world rankings than in, say, the U.S News rankings of national colleges.For this reason, our list below shows the Times rankings of American public universities for three years: 2012, 2013, and 2014.
It is notable that this year American universities hold 46 of the top 100 spots in the rankings, up from 43 last year, showing that despite years of national criticism, the world still holds our universities in the highest regard.
Of the 46 U.S. universities in the top 100, public universities account for 21 places and private universities for another 25. In last year’s rankings, publics also held 24 places and private American schools held 19.
Private U.S. schools occupy 16 of the top 50 world places this year, while public U.S. universities hold 13 of the top 50 places. The top five public universities this year are UC Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, Washington, and UT Austin.
Deserving of special mention are Penn State, which rose from 61 in 2013 to 49 in 2014, and Purdue, which improved its ranking to 62 this year versus 69 last year.2
The Times surveys 400 institutions, so being in the top 100 is certainly a noteworthy achievement. The continuing worldwide respect for U.S. higher education is even more remarkable, given the number of detractors in this country.
The Times rankings do not ignore metrics for class size and financial resources as they focus on research, but they certainly do not make them determinative. The downside to the Times list is that it does not include a metric for graduation rates.
We believe that they are most useful in tandem with some of the other rankings that place more emphasis on class size as well as graduation rates. In effect, the Times rankings offset some of the shortcomings of the U.S. News rankings, and the U.S. News rankings do the same for the Times rankings.
The list below shows the U.S. public universities that are among the top 100 universities in the world, according to the Times rankings. Following the name of the university, we will show the world rank for 2014 first, followed by the 2013 rank and the 2012 rank.
U.S. Public Universities in the Top 100 Worldwide:
The annual U.S. News Best Colleges edition for 2014 lists 29 public universities among the top 50 nationally in undergraduate engineering, and Rutgers, Iowa State, Ohio State, and UC Santa Barbara all gained at least four places in the rankings compared to 2013. Rutgers led the way with an increase of seven places.
Below are the leading public programs in engineering, with the 2014 listed first, followed by the 2013 ranking. The symbols +, =, and – precede the name of the university to indicate whether the 2014 ranking is higher, the same, or lower than the 2013 ranking. Please note that a change as small as .1 on the 5.0 scale can lead to a change of two or more places.
=UC Berkeley–2014 (3); 2013 (3)
=Georgia Tech–2014 (5); 2013 (5)
=Illinois–2014 (5); 2013 (5)
=Michigan–2014 (7); 2013 (7)
=Purdue–2014 (10); 2013 (10)
=UT Austin–2014 (10); 2013 (10)
=Wisconsin–2014 (13); 2013 (13)
+Texas A&M–2014 (15); 2013 (16)
+Virginia Tech–2014 (15); 2013 (16)
-Penn State–2014 (19); 2013 (16)
+UCLA–2014 (19); 2013 (20)
=Maryland–2014 (23); 2013 (23)
=Minnesota–2014 (23); 2013 (23)
+Ohio State–2014 (26); 2013 (30)
-UC San Diego–2014 (26); 2013 (23)
-Washington–2014 (26); 2013 (23)
-NC State–2014 (32); 2013 (30)
-UC Davis–2014 (32); 2013 (30)
+Colorado–2014 (32); 2013 (34)
+Iowa State–2014 (35); 2013 (39)
+UC Santa Barbara–2014 (35); 2013 (39)
-Florida–2014 (35); 2013 (34)
-Virginia–2014 (35); 2013 (34)
+Arizona State–2014 (43); 2013 (44)
+Michigan State–2014 (43); 2013 (44)
+Rutgers–2014 (43); 2013 (50)
+Colo School of Mines-2014 (49); 2013 (53)
-UC Irvine–2014 (49); 2013 (44)
+Pitt–2014 (49); 2013 (50)
Arizona, Auburn, and Delaware were all ranked at number 53 in the 2014 report.
