There are four separate indicator rankings for online master's of engineering degree programs: admissions selectivity rankings, faculty credentials and training rankings, student engagement and accreditation rankings, and student services and technology rankings. To make U.S. News's honor roll of top online graduate engineering programs, a school needed to place in the top third of ranked schools (rounded) in at least three of these four modules.
[See all methodologies for U.S. News's rankings of top online education programs.]
Data collection commenced on July 28, 2011, using a password protected online system. On that day, U.S.News & World Report E-mailed surveys to all 257 regionally accredited institutions that offered at least one master's level, ABET-accredited engineering program, using U.S. News internal records as sources.
Respondents were asked at the beginning whether they offered these programs with course content at least 80 percent accessible to students online. (This threshold is in keeping with The Sloan Consortium's industry standard definition of what constitutes an online course.) Those selecting "yes" were then requested to report in depth statistical information that U.S. News used to compute rankings and build profile pages in its searchable directory of online engineering degree programs.
U.S. News made repeated attempts to get institutions to participate in data collection and then requested that respondents verify their data. By the survey's closing date (Oct. 28, 2011), 192 institutions (75 percent) responded to the survey. Among those, 62 reported offering online engineering degree programs while the rest said they did not.
Three schools that reported offering programs said that 2011 was their first year doing so; therefore, U.S. News did not include these new programs in any of the online engineering degree rankings because of their inabilities to supply a full academic year's worth of data. Their information is included in the online directory of searchable program profiles.
The survey instructed survey respondents to report information at the program level rather than the school level. As a result, questions asking for descriptive statistics on students and faculty—such as enrollment or numbers of course offerings—requested aggregations of data across all of an institution's online engineering degree programs. In contrast, questions not asking for profile data—such as tuition or technology offerings—could not be aggregated, and schools were asked to report what was most 'typical' given the breadth of their programs. Some data provided by schools with multiple online engineering degree programs are consequently representative of the typical program at the school rather than being fully applicable to each distinct one.
For all student and faculty data, the survey asked schools to incorporate in their calculations to the best of their abilities only students and faculty who were engaged in online accessible courses applicable toward online accessible engineering degrees. In cases when schools offered both fully integrated online and face-to-face engineering degree programs in which no distinctions between online students/faculty and face-to-face students/faculty were made by the schools, respondents were encouraged to provide data on online students/faculty based on informed estimates. Most important was that the standards used for reporting online students and faculty in these blended programs were consistent.
Once the survey deadline passed, U.S. News analyzed the quantity and quality of data collected to determine which questions could be used for rankings. Some questions garnered response rates too low to be used. Other questions received data that appeared unreliable for various reasons.
Therefore, rather than producing an overall ranking based on incomplete and sometimes inconsistently reported information, U.S. News decided this year to instead produce four distinct online engineering degree rankings comprised only from select questions that significant percentages of schools answered.
Corrected on 1/10/12: An earlier version of this article did not correctly define an online engineering degree indicator relating to faculty experience.
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