re: Which school in the SEC would you send your children?

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Based on my experience! What else?

As I have said countless times, I feel that many of these rankings are very arbitrary and the research capabilities are there for both schools to the appropriate level. For example, Arkansas is in the highest level of Carnegie Classification, which is widely considered to be the standard for identifying doctorate and research activity at a university. However, Auburn isn't on there. Does this mean that Arkansas is a better engineering school than Auburn? Most people would say no. This is one of the many reasons why I don't take these ranking things very seriously (there are many other reasons that I won't get into).

In regards to research funding, you are probably right that A&M has more because they are a much larger school. However, I never had a problem with funding short of trying to propose to our department to sign up for Formula SAE 6 months before the deadline. However, for personal research there was never an issue.

In regards to support? Puh-lease. That is such a silly stance to make. There is no way that you can substantiate that claim in any way. The fact that my professors and graduate assistants would be on call 24/7 and spent many weekends and late nights with me on my projects was support enough for me, as were our sponsors who were able to squeeze us into their busy schedules, oftentimes cutting into their own profit margins.

In regards to graduate work, I will agree with you that the name of the institution is weighed more heavily, but as I have mentioned several times, I so far see no difference in education quality between the two. Please remember that this is what the original discussion was about. Quality of education, not name or reputation.

Georgia Tech

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How can experience at one university and not the other drive anything but feelings, which I argue are irrelevant. Why do we have rankings? Is it just to make some universities arbitrarily look good and others bad?

Of course we can cherry pick colleges/departments from any university and say it is better here than there. I am talking across the board. Look at things like faculty salaries, grant money, publications, and graduate placement. These things, along with reputation (occasionally) are usually interacted in some way to come up with the rankings. The Carengie rankings are quite broad and only categorically distinguishable. Arkansas has not been VH for very long by the way. We have to look beyond that. I admit as a general rule, few doctoral programs outside of VH are worth attending. There are, as you point out, exceptions to this.

Check these out (I left off the typical US News rankings because they are known to be quite subjective):

MUP

A&M Endowment

ARWU

NSF

AAU - Also a broad category, but much narrower than VH

There are others, but I think we can see that rankings are not just some group of elites coming up with arbitrary lists. Things can be measured and ordered. Are they all meaningless with respect to quality of education? If the question had been where we could send kids for degree X, then maybe we could pick more subjectively. As long as we are talking in general terms then we have to go with the evidence we have. Feelings, hearsay, and knowing people are simply not good enough to produce an informed answer.

I continue to maintain that all schools in the SEC can produced fine graduates, as can all schools in the Sun Belt. When we get down to brass tacks though, something separates some schools from others. I cannot see how one could argue that universities that produce more scholarly output to their respective fields, have more financial support, better job placement, and more difficult admission standards are not superior places to be educated.