Not sure it makes any difference any more there are hard times coming for all these colleges.

Is nothing sacred? It's t.u. da**it!

I know this is an old thread but I just felt compelled to chime in here and say what an incredibly stupid question.

TAMU is currently ranked by US News & World Report as the 26th best public university in the country. There's a huge gap between a diploma mill and the 26th best public university in the country. TAMU has multiple Nobel Laureates on its faculty. Your question makes me think that you don't know what a diploma mill is. In any case, no, TAMU is very much not a diploma mill.

It's certainly not a stupid question. It's a valid concern.

bmks270 said:

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Yes.
Approximately 70% acceptance rate.
I'm shocked the engineering school
still ranks as high as it does.

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That's because that number is deeply flawed.

When my son did Spend the Night they went over the real numbers. 55k Applicants but only about 17k got "Regular Admit" meaning they were starting as a Freshman in CS full time. About 5k are Blinn/Gateway. The rest of the "63%" were "System Admits" that can go go Corpus or something for a year and hope to transfer in, many of those kids go elsewhere (usually OOS or Baylor/Private or Tech) and most who go that route never enroll in CS. Still that's the largest part of the "acceptance" pool even though very few of those kids will ever even take a class in CS.

A&M simply doesn't care about the stat. They don't need to because they have so many applicants and they don't even recruit compared to other schools. A&M has well over 90% In State students despite its size which is just insane compared to other large public schools outside of Texas (many are under 50% and recruit like crazy). Our focus in on Research Spend and salaries after graduation, that's where A&M really shines and those stats mean a lot more than what US News cares about. They are also much, much harder to achieve. A&M's mission is to the State and not the University itself and it accomplishes that very well.

As for Engineering specifically here is an anecdote. Have a buddy of mine that is a huge Tsip with a son that graduated Valedictorian at a Mid sized HS. He's going to Johns Hopkins to study Biomedical Engineering, brilliant kid. Took him up for an A&M game where they had the Engineering Open House and showed him around the building. He was absolutely blown away and couldn't stop talking about how it was "elite" and "world class" and very much in the same sentence as Hopkins and in many ways superior (Hopkins is obviously superior purely in Medical as the largest Med Research school). He admitted he would rather his younger son go to A&M than Texas as well.