NOBODY at any university I’ve ever heard of has looked at Prowler rankings, but the U.S. News rankings, while imperfect, are looked at heavily. I know a lot of people complain about the rankings overall, and they aren’t perfect, but if you talk to people who know colleges well, their own opinions rarely are too different from those in the rankings. The major problem is that it costs a lot to ensure that your school is doing all the things that are likely to raise your rankings significantly, and schools with poor rankings often cannot afford to do these things, so the rich get richer and the poor stay poor. The fact is that you rarely hear schools who are ranked well complain about the rankings system too much; it is mostly those who are poorly ranked.

Neither. All you have to do is search on Google to find numerous articles telling you why those rankings mean nothing. My favorite reason: the score for each school that gets the most weight is some “assessment” that’s based on what high school guidance counselors give as how strong they believe the school to be. Do you honestly think that every guidance counselor in America knows enough about EVERY COLLEGE in America to rank them like that? Do they even know enough about the top few schools to rank them?

The answer is: No, there’s no way they can. And that’s just the beginning. If you’re enrolling as an undergrad, then the quality of a grad program at your school has a very limited – but still relevant – role in how good your education will be. One of the best undergraduate educations in the country, based on how much students work and how much they learn, is supposedly at Reed College, and they have tiny graduate programs.

As a person who goes to a school ranked in the top 5 by US News, I can tell you that their rankings are no good at all. You should be looking for the school that will allow YOU to do your best work. When you do good work, you have better relationships and get better letters of recommendation, which ANY employer or ANYbody sitting on an admissions committee will tell you are worth their weight in gold.

What you should do is check out where students are happiest with the field that you’d like to pursue. If it’s Comp Sci, then the places that come to mind are MIT, CalTech, Berkeley, Brown, Purdue, and Duke, but I’m not a CS person so you should ask around. Those places have happy students that are very talented and produce good work because they love where they are.

Honestly, that really is the most important criterion.

U S News, Washington Monthly and Princeton Review all publish rankings. There are a few more rankings lists scattered around here and there. “Just take someone else’s word for it.” That’s what rankings are, for many people. They give some people a good general idea, but, face it, their purpose is to sell magazines. Manhattan College’s Engineering program is accredited by the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET) as all the best engineering programs are. So have confidence that it’s programs are fully accepted/recognized by the profession, industry and academia.