America Sees 9 of 10 Top Honors in World Ranking of 200 Engineering Schools

See how your school ranks against 200 engineering schools according to influential list.

Shanghai Jiao Tong University recently released their 2015 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). Since 2003, the school has used a transparent methodology to crunch third party data into their popular list. This year, nine of the 10 top engineering schools are located within America.

This should be good news for the USA’s STEM movement as The Chronical of Higher Education noted that the ARWU list is “the best-known and most influential global ranking of universities.”

The list is broken down into five categories:

  • Natural Science and Mathematics,
  • Engineering/Technology and Computer Sciences,
  • Life and Agriculture Sciences,
  • Clinical Medicine and Pharmacy and
  • Social Science.

Published with each list is a pool of statistics and the methodology used to rank the institutions. For engineering schools, an equal weighting was given based on four categories: the school’s number of highly cited researchers, publications, articles in top publications and funding.

As a result, a major flaw exists in this ranking list – a lack of education pedagogy. The list focuses solely on research, as not one category focuses education. Therefore, this list might be more useful to those looking to fulfill a research based engineering masters or doctorate at one of these schools.

However, it is unreasonable to assume that the research capabilities of the school will translate into the classroom. After all, we’ve all had that brilliant professor that can fill a publication but leave the heads in the classroom empty.

Just because a university has great research funded by big government spending projects doesn’t mean it’s pushing out good engineers come graduation. As a result, the list may not be as useful for those looking to fulfill an undergraduate or a course-based engineering master’s degree.

Furthermore, funding fuels much of the other categories that ARWU looks at so it isn’t surprising to see the USA dominating the list.

A lot of funding is pouring into the STEM movement which looks to ensure that America leads the world in technological professionals. As a result, it could be argued that the list is artificially inflated.

The richest schools may not be the best schools and the best schools may not be the best for you. It may be best to ensure you do your own research when looking for an education.

Here is a list of ARWU’s top 20 engineering schools:

1                     Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA                 

2                     Stanford University, USA

3                     University of California, Berkeley, USA                          

4                     University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA       

5                     The University of Texas at Austin, USA

6                     The Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, UK         

7                     Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

8                     University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, USA        

9                     Carnegie Mellon University, USA

10                 Texas A&M University, USA

11                 Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

12                 Tsinghua University, China

13                 University of Cambridge, UK                              

14                 Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Switzerland                             

14                 University of California, San Diego, USA

16                 Pennsylvania State University – University Park, USA              

17                 National University of Singapore, Singapore

17                 University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

19                 Purdue University – West Lafayette, USA

20                 California Institute of Technology, USA

For a full list and scores follow this link.

Written by

Shawn Wasserman

For over 10 years, Shawn Wasserman has informed, inspired and engaged the engineering community through online content. As a senior writer at WTWH media, he produces branded content to help engineers streamline their operations via new tools, technologies and software. While a senior editor at Engineering.com, Shawn wrote stories about CAE, simulation, PLM, CAD, IoT, AI and more. During his time as the blog manager at Ansys, Shawn produced content featuring stories, tips, tricks and interesting use cases for CAE technologies. Shawn holds a master’s degree in Bioengineering from the University of Guelph and an undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo.