The Boston University College of Engineering is steadily rising in national rankings, placing 41st among 200 engineering schools and sixth for its biomedical engineering graduate program, in the most recent U.S. News ‘ World Report standings.
The rankings, released April 2, bump both ENG and the biomedical engineering program up one spot from the 2006 standings.
“My theory is that if you aim for excellence, the rankings will follow,” said ENG dean Kenneth Lutchen, “and you can’t fake excellence.
“When we add better faculty, we increase our success in getting excellent research performed here, which attracts more grants and publishes more papers in higher quality journals,” he continued.
Although rankings may seem to place schools in direct competition with one another, Lutchen said rankings help universities improve their programs.
“Instead of competing with other universities, it’s more like learning from your peers,” he said. “When your peer institutions are doing things that are adding to their excellence, you try to get a sense of what they are doing and what you are not doing, so that you can increase your own level of excellence.”
U.S. News ‘ World Report publishes annual extensive rankings of the country’s university programs to help students find their best match, said Cynthia Powell, public relations director of U.S. News ‘ World Report.
“There are roughly 10,000 pieces of information that our research team takes into account when we create these rankings,” she said. “We want to provide very accurate information so that our readers can make apples-to-apples comparisons as they try to make a huge financial decision.”
The research team considers dean and student surveys, faculty evaluations and general college funding, among other categories, Powell said.
“Prior to our rankings, this kind of information was simply not available, and students would have to rely on marketing statistics provided by the university or by word of mouth,” she said. “What we do is consumer journalism at its best.”
As one of the largest biomedical engineering departments in the country, BME integrates fields of study and collaborates with other BU departments, including some within the School of Medicine, Lutchen said.
ENG third-year doctoral student Henry Lee, who is in the BME program, said the rankings played an important part in his decision to study in ENG.
“I paid close attention to the rankings for a few years as I made my decision about graduate schools, and I noticed that BU was steadily climbing up, which is a very good sign,” Lee said.
Nevertheless, he also said he paid attention to how much academic freedom the different engineering school programs gave him. Lee said he came to BU wanting to study neural science within engineering, but after experimenting with different fields at BU, he changed his direction.
“Some universities insist that you apply to a certain professor working in a particular field and stay there,” he said. “BU gives you the opportunity to explore numerous fields and make your own decision.”