Harvard and Yale are regarded as the national gold standard in college education, but not in engineering.

Charles Murray

October 31, 2016

2 Min Read
Better Than Harvard: 15 Best Buys in Engineering Education

Harvard and Yale are regarded as the national gold standard in college education, but not in engineering. According to US News & World Report’s new 2017 Best Colleges, 15 public engineering programs are more highly ranked. And while the tuition at Harvard and Yale exceeds $47,000 a year, state schools can be had for as little as $10,000.

Don’t misunderstand -- Harvard, Yale, and other Ivies have great engineering programs and are deserving of the avalanche of accolades they’re received over the years. But we've collected information about major universities from California to Maryland that offer bachelor's, master's, and PhDs in engineering. And they’re every bit as good, if not better, than those gold standard colleges.

Click on the image below to see who they are and how they excel.

The University of California-Berkeley’s engineering program is ranked third in the country, compared to Harvard’s 28th and Yale’s 37th, according to US News & World Report’s Best Colleges. In-state tuition is $13,431 and out-of-state is $38K. It’s also rated in the top five in eight engineering specialties, including chemical, civil, computer, electrical, environmental, industrial, materials, and mechanical engineering. As an added bonus, it’s a stone’s throw from Silicon Valley. (Source: By brainchildvn on Flickr - Flickr, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6638057)

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Senior technical editor Chuck Murray has been writing about technology for 32 years. He joined Design News in 1987, and has covered electronics, automation, fluid power, and autos.

About the Author(s)

Charles Murray

Charles Murray is a former Design News editor and author of the book, Long Hard Road: The Lithium-Ion Battery and the Electric Car, published by Purdue University Press. He previously served as a DN editor from 1987 to 2000, then returned to the magazine as a senior editor in 2005. A former editor with Semiconductor International and later with EE Times, he has followed the auto industry’s adoption of electric vehicle technology since 1988 and has written extensively about embedded processing and medical electronics. He was a winner of the Jesse H. Neal Award for his story, “The Making of a Medical Miracle,” about implantable defibrillators. He is also the author of the book, The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards Behind the Supercomputer, published by John Wiley & Sons in 1997. Murray’s electronics coverage has frequently appeared in the Chicago Tribune and in Popular Science. He holds a BS in engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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