MIT is consistently the top-rated engineering college in the world and it has a perfect 100 percent score according to QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) World University Rankings. In fact, only 10.7 percent of its applicants get in. If you're one of them, you can earn a degree in electrical, materials, civil, environmental, nuclear, chemical, biological or mechanical engineering and take advantage of MIT's third place ranking in salary potential. Like all top-tier schools, attending isn't cheap, as MIT charges a $75 application fee and tuition is $39,212 a year with room and board adding another $11,234. MIT's 168-acre campus has about 20 labs and research centers where students participate in cutting-edge projects. With more than $700 million spent in 2009, these labs have a lot to do with MIT's impact on society.
With a QS score of 83.3, Stanford University's engineering reputation is second only to MIT. Stanford's 8,180-acre campus in the California Bay Area is the largest in the world and it's the home of the Stanford Solar Car Project, where students design, build and race a solar car every two years. Only 8 percent of Stanford applicants are accepted and it costs them $90 to apply, $39,201 a year for tuition and another $11,876 for room and board.
Berkeley is another California Bay Area school and its QS score of 82.7 puts it in third place just behind Stanford. Twenty-two percent of Berkeley applicants are accepted and it costs them $60 to apply and $10,868 annual tuition if they're California residents. Out-of-state residents pay $33,747 for tuition and $15,308 for room and board every year. Berkeley has a cutting-edge engineering division and in February of 2011, students discovered how to grow nanolasers on a silicon surface. This could open the door to better microprocessors.
The fourth-ranked engineering college in the world lies across the pond in England. Cambridge has a rating of 72.5 in the QS World University Rankings and it's the best engineering school outside the U.S. according to Shanghai Jiao Tong University and THES (Times Higher Education Supplement) rankings. Cambridge won the national Research Assessment Exercise for General Engineering in 2008 and its largest department is its engineering division, as 10 percent of all university activities are engineering related.