What makes an engineering program good?

[bolido2000]

I am just wondering what makes an engineering program at school X better than school Y. I'm an undergrad in engineering at UCLA and personally I don't understand why is in the top 20. Professors can't teach, computer lab sucks (its changing now), and many of the people I know don't seem that bright....
I am just thinking that at the undergrad level any student that graduates from a decent school should be pretty much, knowledgewise, on the same level, no?

 

[Calundronius]

You'd be surprised how bad some engineering programs are, some are really dumbed down. I compared notes with a friend of mine, and the difference is startling. My college goes into much greater detail (the disadvantage is that it's harder to keep up) and offers more common programming languages, a bigger selection of specializations (the EE program has I don't even know how many specializations you can get, from power systems to electronics, etc.)

Your question is more along the lines of how they rank the colleges, and I have no idea how they do that.

 

[diskop]

They are usually ranked by the research the professors, graduates and staff do.

 

[quirky]

yip, the rankinngs r pure BS