Interesting effort here, but would love to see further details - when it comes to salary information, I think it is among the hardest data to get. I recently tried to research average salariies for analog engineers and the ranges I came up with over the Internet were so broad they were useless. So I went to the source: A hiring manager in Silicon Valley, who could tell me exactly the range they were paying, and for what. When it comes to engineering, the skill sets are so diverse it's hard to pin it down by a broad term like "analog engineer."
Somehow, when MIT comes in 7th for anything related to engineering, you have to wonder. Also, I was surprised to see math sciences listed under a different category than generic engineering. (No, I didn't go to MIT. I'm just sayin'.)
I'm not sure that anyone would or should use these numbers in making a decision on where to go to school, though. There are way too many variables, including in how these numbers were derived.
Making an international comparison might not be all that fair or valid, though, unless one normalizes the results. (For instance, engineering graduate salaries in the country vs the average salary in that country, and even that is fraught with problems. Countries with huge income differences will come out way ahead.) For myself, I can say without hesitation that salary expectations had nothing to do with my choice of major. And by extension, any supposedly different salary expectations of the different schools to which I applied, even less so!
Rankings I would find more valid would be the caliber of student the school admits into their engineering programs. Reason being, that's what the student will be competing against (or with), to get his/her degree. In some schools, it's a particularly "tough crowd," as you put it, Susan. Sort of a trial by fire, if you will, which teaches you to question everything you think you know over and over again.
I remember back in highschool I looked up a list of jobs that I wanted to have, but started filtering out by average salaries of them. I eventually got into engineering related field, specifically R&D. I like my work for what I do, not by how much I receive for it. Articles like this can make prospective students to choose these disciplines for the money, not for their passion for education and their personal value.
Money is probably the few commodity with widely harmonized value, but they shouldn't be the only thing in life.
Show this article to all those Silicon Valley high-school-dropout CEOs and ask them what they think. In my opinion, these drop tous chose to do what they love, and I am sure they didn't want to make money at first (other wise, they wouldn't have dropped out IF this statistic the article shows is true).
Maybe having articles like "Top 10 ECE schools by crime rate" be more useful so at least the prospective students know where to study safe.
I really liked this kind of article when I was a student, but I have figured out it is non-sense when I started working.