School Scoring Methodology
An institution’s score is calculated with seven data points:
- Student-to-Faculty Ratio
- Smaller ratios are typically indicative of better educational experience
- Graduation Rate
- Institutions with high graduation rates typically are committed to student success and offer quality degrees.
- Retention Rate
- High retention rates typically indicate overall student satisfaction with an institution.
- Percentage of Online Students
- Institutions with a high percentage of online students better deliver effective online programs and online degrees.
- Concentrated Influence
- Through our partnership with AcademicInfluence.com we offer this unique and revolutionary ranking metric that allows us to calculate an institutions’s academic importance through analysis of how often the institution’s faculty are cited in academic works.
- Desirability
- An institution’s desirability is a measurement of relationship between how many students were offered admission to a school and how many students accepted that institutions’s offer.
- Exclusivity
- An institution’s exclusivity is a measurement of the relationshipt between the number of students applied who applied versus the number of students admitted
For each data point, we score an institution based on how it compare to the highest scoring institution in that category. Institutions with missing data for a given data point receive a zero for that data point.
We then weigh each data point and calculate an institution’s raw score.
Finally, the institution with the highest raw score is has its score adjusted to 99. All other schools are given an equally proportionate adjustment to their score.
Program Scoring Methodology
An institution’s program score is calculated with seven data points:
- Student-to-Faculty Ratio
- Smaller ratios are typically indicative of better educational experience
- Ratio of Degrees Awarded in Program Field
- Institutions that award more degrees in a given field typically are more effective at teaching and instructing in that field.
- Graduation Rate
- Institutions with high graduation rates typically are committed to student success and offer quality degrees.
- Retention Rate
- High retention rates typically indicate overall student satisfaction with an institution.
- Percentage of Online Students
- Institutions with a high percentage of online students better deliver effective online programs and online degrees.
- Concentrated Influence
- Through our partnership with AcademicInfluence.com we offer this unique and revolutionary ranking metric that allows us to calculate an institutions’s academic importance through analysis of how often the institution’s faculty are cited in academic works.
- Desirability
- An institution’s desirability is a measurement of relationship between how many students were offered admission to a school and how many students accepted that institutions’s offer.
- Exclusivity
- An institution’s exclusivity is a measurement of the relationship between the number of students applied who applied versus the number of students admitted
For each data point, we score an institution based on how it compare to the highest scoring institution in that category. Institutions with missing data for a given data point receive a zero for that data point.
We then weigh each data point and calculate an institution’s raw score.
Finally, the institution with the highest raw score is has its score adjusted to 99. All other schools are given an equally proportionate adjustment to their score.
Cost Methodology
Each institution falls into a cost bracket. These brackets are determined by the 20th, 40th, 60th, 80th, and 100th tuition percentiles for all online engineering colleges. These correspond to brackets of:
Undergraduate Cost Break Points
- $0 – $8,255
- $8,256 – $9,841
- $9,842 – $12,562
- $12,563 – $31,148
- $31,147+
Graduate Cost Break Points
- $0 – $7,088
- $7,089 – $9,684
- $9,685 – $12,790
- $12,791 – $18,912
- $18,913+
Institutions that do not report tuition data do not fall into any bracket.
Value Methodology
To calculate an institutions’s value, we first separately rank institutions by score and cost. Then we average an institution’s score rank with its cost rank to determine its overall value.
Sources
Data at OnlineEngineering.org is gathered from government bodies as well as our partners at AcademicInfluence.com. We may occasionally fill in missing salary information with data from other web sources. Our primary sources include: