Dear Colleagues,

As you are aware, the USNWR graduate rankings were released a few days ago - attached are the ChE rankings for this year, and also for comparison those issued last year.  We are at rank 14, and tied with CMU, Northwestern and UC-Boulder.  Last year, we tied at rank 13, with CMU and UIUC (tied at rank 12 this year).  Our score remains unchanged at 3.8 – pl recall that program rankings are based only on peer evaluations, without any data provided to ChE Heads who do the ranking.

In general, the rankings for the top ChE programs are essentially unchanged from last year.  Special mention should be made of Northwestern (#17 last year) and UC-Boulder (#18 last year) – these programs showed good improvement and tied at #14 with CMU and us this year.

I would like to make one observation re the rankings.  Some of the programs ranked just ahead of us have a much larger number of PhD graduates in academia and some of them are now Heads, who are naturally inclined to vote higher for their alma mater.  As I have also mentioned previously, we need to place more PhD graduates in academia – this picture is changing for us, but only slowly.

Congratulations to all for their creative and hard work.  With the outstanding faculty recruiting we have been doing, we will definitely improve rank in future years – it has been great teamwork and the best is yet to come!

Arvind

Arvind Varma
R. Games Slayter Distinguished Professor
Jay and Cynthia Ihlenfeld Head of Chemical Engineering
Purdue University

Tel: 765-494-4075; Fax: 765-494-0805; Email: avarma@purdue.edu
https://engineering.purdue.edu/ChE/People/ptProfile?id=11068