The Top 100 Universities In The World

The top three spots on the QS World University Rankings changed this year, with MIT taking the top spot for 2012. MIT overtook the University of Cambridge, which took second place ahead of Harvard, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

British schools took four of the top six spots, but American colleges and universities occupy 13 of the top 20 spots in the annual ranking.

This ranking is based on reputation among academics, reputation among employers, citations per faculty, staff-to-student ratios and international attractiveness. Check out the entire list:

Hmm, my alma mater, Emory, is consistently ranked in the top twenty-five in the US, has been as high as 16, and is consistently ranked higher than Carnegie-Mellon, where my brother went. Yet Carnegie-Mellon is at 49 and Emory failed to make the list. University of Pittsburgh makes the list, but Emory doesn’t? I’m not buying it.

First let me lay everything on the table - I graduated from Cal Poly in 79 with a BSEE. So by definition I got a hands-on learn-by-doing education. I know for a fact that Poly still does things essentially the same way. I was accepted at Davis - so I would have made it into the top 100 ;-) but chose Poly instead. (Let’s face it - SLO has it all over Davis!)

So now to the point of the post - during my time at Poly we went through “Accreditation.” This was only the 2nd time the department HAD done this, and had only been accredited for 5 years previously. Yep - that means that all the BSEE grads from 1937 to the very early 70s didn’t attend an “Accredited” program. Why? well Cal Poly wasn’t coed till the 60s, and wasn’t trying to play in the big leagues either. Once they became a “UNIVERSITY” this became important.

At the time - the story was that UCLA’s accreditation was put on probation because of their LACK of labs. The story went that you could take a BSEE there without EVER having an engineering lab. Poly’s the polar opposite, i.e. there isn’t an engineering class WITHOUT a lab in the program (so yes - I know which end of the waveguide to grab ;-)

My recent experience with some UCLA trained PHd’s. They were why we had to do 4 spins on the analog portion of our latest chip design! They made the same careless mistakes over and over again! What is the first thing you check on a schematic - that you have the POWER hooked up correctly. That is what they repeatedly did wrong! We won’t talk about the basic circuits not being reliable across temperature/process too!

So does that answer your question? ;-)

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