The US News & World Report has released its national rankings of graduate programs for this year. The discipline rankings are based entirely on peer evaluations, whereas the college rankings are a combination of peer and recruiter assessments, along with a variety of performance-based factors. EE ranked #9, and CmpE ranked #9. Both programs improved from last year.

Last year the College of Engineering tied with Georgia Tech, Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Michigan for the #6 position in the college-level rankings. This year, although the overall scores are still very close, the field separated, with Michigan at #6, Georgia Tech and Illinois tied at #7, and Purdue at #9, with scores of 72, 71, 71, and 70 respectively. This is obviously not the direction in which we want to be moving, but it is not entirely unexpected. Our peer and recruiter scores are the same as last year’s, but measures that have number of faculty in the denominator - in particular, research expenditures per faculty and PhD students per faculty - dropped, reflecting the increase in our overall faculty size by 8% in the past year and 20% since Fall 2013. From the beginning of Engineering’s expansion, we have anticipated this possible effect and hope that it will be short-lived. This year also saw a drop in the two-year average overall research expenditures with the winding down of multiple major grants, but we expect that some recent major research awards will restore the numbers next year.