Make a list of the qualities in engineering schools that are important to you. Consider issues used by ranking companies, such as recruiter assessment, quality of the student body, student-faculty ratio and school funding, all of which have obvious importance. However, come up with your own qualities. For instance, if you need schools to give you scholarship aid, add that to your list. Consider whether you need a school to prioritize a particular program, such as Biomedical Engineering as opposed to Electrical Engineering. Decide whether you want to live at home, or whether there are particular cities in which you would like to study.
Assign each quality from your list a percentile weighting. For instance, let's say that you want to go to school for Chemical Engineering, you want a scholarship, you want to get away from your parents and you want your school to serve good food in the dining halls (this is extremely important, since you will be eating in the dining halls for four years), in declining order of priority. You could assign the first one a 35 percent weighting, the second one a 30 percent weighting, the third a 25 percent weighting and the fourth a 10 percent weighting.
Research the schools that you are considering on the Internet, talk to current and past students of those schools and visit the schools. Rank the schools that you are considering, on a scale of 1 to10, in regard to the qualities that are important to you.
Multiply your rankings by your percentile weightings. Let's say that you're a student in Texas, and you don't particularly care where you go to school, as long as it's not in Texas. You want to study Electrical Engineering, and there's a school in Boston to which you have a good chance of getting a scholarship. The school's Electrical Engineering program, while decent, is not accredited by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, which might matter if you want to work in industry. However, the college has great food, cooked by chefs-in-training from a neighboring culinary school. You might assign the food a 9, the program merits a 4, the location a 10 and the scholarship an 8. Multiply each of these rankings by their percentile rankings to come up with a composite score.
Compare the composite scores of all of the schools that you are considering. Rank them in order of composite score.