The Most Innovative IT Schools?

It must be getting close to September, because that “back to school” month is when magazines come out with various rankings of colleges and, sure enough, rankings issues are starting to hit the newsstands. This week Computerworld released its list of 56 “most innovative” IT schools in the U.S. The magazine chose to profile 13 of them. Listed in no particular order (at least no order explained by the magazine), they are:

Carnegie Mellon University
Georgia State University
Indiana University at Bloomington
Northeastern University
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Stanford University
University of Pennsylvania
University of Virginia
Virginia Tech
Polytechnic Institute of New York University
San Jose State University
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
University of Washington

How were these universities selected? By their reputations among a small group of people. Computerworld polled about two dozen IT executives and academics and asked them to name “graduate-level IT programs and schools that are giving graduates the best deal in terms of salary increases or promotions vs. cost of tuition, and that are best at gearing their curriculum to the everyday demands of today’s IT workplace.”

The magazine’s editors picked the 13 to profile, while the Web site lists all 56 institutions. Some of them even get letter grades, derived from a survey of alumni who were asked to rate their institution’s impact on their careers, as well as the relevance of course content to on-the-job activities. Carnegie Mellon got props for its human-computer interaction program, and an A from 152 alumni surveyed. Georgia State got a B+, based on answers from 14 graduates. It makes one wonder what students and professors at these lauded institutions make of the statistical validity of the survey. —Josh Fischman