ABET accreditation in 'Engineering Science' vs 'Mechanical Engineering'

I noticed that Trinity University, TX has an ABET accreditation for ‘engineering science’ rather than being accredited for Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering, etc.
Does this matter? Any impact on rigor or value of the BS degree one would receive from TU? How about job prospects as a graduate with that degree w/o pursuing a masters degree?
Thanks!

You may want to check the course offerings to see whether they include the usual courses that other schools include in their ABET-accredited mechanical engineering programs.

I don’t do hiring for industry, but I do have a role in graduate admissions, and seeing engineering science as opposed to engineering would definitely give me pause. I’d have to really investigate the individual program to make an informed decision. Luckily, I am generally willing to do that. I wouldn’t assume that everybody in my position shares that willingness.

PSU has an engineering science major as well, an honors program in the engineering department. It is designed to give a broad foundation, combining the “hard” math and science prerequisites with a smattering of foundational courses in several engineering fields. It is supposed to prepare students for interdisciplinary work, grad school in several disciplines, or similar such areas.

I had a friend who graduated from the program, smart as a tack, did her honors thesis on microwave welding of plastics. Not sure what she did after, but it seemed like a quality program. The only downside is that the more flexible curriculum means you don’t have any real idea what the student did until you look at the transcript.

This is a perfectly valid form of ABET engineering accreditation. It’s most common with smaller schools, which might have only a single engineering department and a limited number of students. Dartmouth, Olin, Harvey Mudd, Smith, and Swarthmore are examples. Sometimes larger universities have “general” engineering programs that have this form of ABET accreditation too.

My school has engineering science as a technical breadth option which is basically a mini minor all students have to to do. It’s mostly just more science classes and some classes that apply engineering in some way. It’s viewed but a lot of students here as the easy tech breadth. You’re better off choosing Mech e which is one of the big 4 traditional engineering degrees

To carry on the point @Corbett made, and probably not so positively, most of those small programs are severely lacking in depth, breadth and facilities. Olin and Mudd are really the only programs of that ilk that seem to be respected in engineering circles.

Where else are you applying?

Thanks @eyemgh. DS is also applying to Lafayette, Binghamton, Purdue, UMD and few others with larger engineering schools.

Lafayette and Trinity are VERY different than Binghamton, Purdue and UMD. Has he visited any of them?

When my son was originally vetting schools, he thought a smaller program like Lafayette or Bucknell might be interesting. After we all visited, he struck them from his list. In comparing them to larger programs, he felt the little schools simply had too little to offer. Now don’t get me wrong on size. WPI is a little school and it made his final 3 (he ended up at Cal Poly). I’m talking about small schools where engineering is a small component like Union, Swarthmore, Bucknell, Lafayette, Smith, Portland, Trinity, etc. Small, nearly total tech schools like WPI, RPI, Olin, HMC, Lehigh, and Rose-Hulman all have the toys, the curriculum and the staff to be well respected.

His original interest was the “Liberal Arts Engineering” hook, until he realized ABET accreditation was so encompassing that he’d get the same number of arts, history and social sciences nearly everywhere and the schools that classically fit that definition lacked curriculum depth and breadth and toys.

What’s your home state?

Thanks @eyemgh. We visited Lafayette, Union, Villanova, Bing, UMD and several others. We realize they are not the same kind of school. DS would prefer a school that has equal representation between tech and non-tech though, including student body, so we stayed away from the schools with heavy engineering focus. He still has to make up his mind between smaller liberal arts school or one of the flagship state schools. We’re from NY.

@WilliamNYC
ABET accredited programs require a large chunk of classroom time to meet the science/engineering requirements. There is only so much time available within a four year period. If a student is surrounded by a number of fellow students who are majoring in non-engineering fields, the hope/expectation is that the engineering student will obtain a broader education by way of osmosis from fellow students. Often a second assumption is that the non-engineering classroom experience will be more engaging and offer a broader experience.

Many years ago, Case Institute of Technology addressed the problem of a broader engineering education by stretching their BS program to five years. Dartmouth has a five year engineering program today. I wanted to support this bold effort, but my father was paying the bill. (Thanks Dad!) I took the more standard four year program at another school (WPI). Within a few years CASE Institute merged with Western Reserve University. Today the CWR BS engineering programs are four years.

Many consumers and employers believe that engineers can benefit from a broad, interdisciplinary perspective. Is there another way of accomplishing this goal?

Although unaware of this concern as a WPI freshman, many faculty were debating this same issue. Their model evolved into a project based education with an interdisciplinary project component and a thematic humanities minor for all engineering majors. The CE, ME, EE, ChE, BME, et al are ABET accredited. The heart of this pedagogy is personalized experience. Live the interdisciplinary experience to develop an understanding of the relationship between your profession and its application to the rest of us. This IQP tends to center in the social sciences. The 18 credit hours in the humanities can take many forms, but seeks a personalized, in depth experience.

Brown and Tufts do not have the same program, but have attempted to maximize flexibility for their engineering students. When students are in an environment which mentors them to make decisions with consequences, they become more committed to their goal. Olin is also a project based education…

                                                                                                                                                                                                                              :bz 

" DS would prefer a school that has equal representation between tech and non-tech though, including student body" - Sometimes that means the student would like more variety of majors in in the non-engineering classes, clubs etc. Sometimes it means preference for campus gender balance… if that’s the case, a partial solution can be to look for college towns with a variety of schools.

Some highly selective colleges like MIT and Harvey Mudd pack more content into four years, so that they can require relatively large amounts of humanities and social studies in the degree requirements alongside the expected breadth and depth of engineering science and engineering design for each engineering major.

But that may not be a general solution for engineering programs and engineering students overall.

Some other colleges have engineering programs that have more than the usual number of credits/courses to graduate in 8 semesters, so a student wanting to graduate in 8 semesters must overload. Presumably, this means that strong students can do that, but other students may take normal loads and graduate in 9 or 10 semesters.

Florida public universities require almost all entering frosh (not just those in engineering) to take at least 9 credits in summer sessions, effectively making the nominal time to degree 8.5 semesters (8 regular semesters plus 1 summer session).

Nearly all of the engineering disciplines at my son’s school are 200 quarter hours, whereas nearly all other degrees are 180.

The problem with Dartmouth is threefold, 1) they don’t give merit aid, so if you don’t have financial need, the degree is at least $300k 2) they don’t take AP/IB credits, so there’s no way to cut that burden 3) and most egregious given the first two, Dartmouth engineering simply isn’t that strong. They deserve an A for concept, but get a D for execution.

@ucbalumnus:

Took a look at Harvey Mudd and MIT to develop some understanding of their program mechanics.

We know both schools have very smart students so they may be able to stuff more material into a credit hour, but I don’t know if this characteristic alone is a solution for the rest of us. I was looking for a more efficient educational vehicle given cost and IQ constraints.

The MIT website reads like a free-for-all academic feast without the constraint of rules. Creativity appreciates some freedom of choice. Classroom and research appear to be the vehicles. They also utilize interdisciplinary projects (see https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/engineering-in-action/putting-projects-at-the-forefront/). For most bright students, mentoring is still an expensive and necessary support process. Many college dropouts have just run with an idea and used the university as a resource lab . They are just looking for laboratory/equipment space, but they may still need patent/funding assistance which many of these schools now offer. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Kamen). Such people are living a project.

Harvey Mudd also pushes strongly for interdisciplinary thinking in their core curriculum and outlines goals in their curriculum design. (see https://www.hmc.edu/institutional-research/institutional-research/institutional-and-educational-goals/#learning-outcomes). “The philosophy of the engineering program at Harvey Mudd College is based on the recognition that there is a professional component that is best addressed through practice gained by working on real problems” (see https://www.hmc.edu/engineering/). They are limited in the range of engineering fields offered, but they probably have “learned how to learn” as all working engineers must today with the short half-life of the rapidly changing “state of the art.”

I am a fan of the WPI “Interactive Qualifying Project” vehicle because it incorporates the integration of social science disciplines with the application of technology in the solution of real world problems. It is experiential often with a personal impact on the participants cultural perspective. By way of example, a student may get to experience a clean water source solution in a remote culture. That is my concept of a broad education. It would take a very good teacher to accomplish this in a classroom environment because this is really experiential. It really helps to live it!

My point? We have moved beyond the classic classroom/lecture approach to learning.

 :bz 

This is getting off topic, but I can hardly agree that “We have moved beyond the classic classroom/lecture approach to learning” based on n=1 of WPI. They are the only institution in the nation that does things the way they do and they’ve been doing it that way since the late 70’s. If they’d created a game changing paradigm, you’d think there would be at least one other adopter of the approach in the last 30+ years. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big WPI fan. My son almost chose to attend, and does attend the original “Learn by Doing” institution, Cal Poly. WPI though, love it or hate it, needs to be acknowledged as an outlier as nearly every other institution in the world, Cal Poly included, has not moved beyond the “classic classroom/lecture approach.”

Olin is teeny (about 340 students total), but they have a parallel/broader agenda to influence on engineering education in general …http://www.olin.edu/collaborate/collaboratory/

quoted from a sublink… "800+ INSTITUTIONS HAVE VISITED OLIN SINCE THE INCEPTION OF THE COLLABORATORY (AS I2E2, THE INITIATIVE FOR INNOVATION IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION) IN 2009 "

DH and I (both engineers) like their project-based approach. But of course programs still need to include traditional academics too.

I am familiar with Penn State’s Engineering Science program. As it is the honors program, the students I knew who were E Sci majors were very smart. I assume some went directly to grad school. I work with a PSU E Sci who is an excellent engineer and especially good at integrating information from other engineering disciplines outside of his area of expertise. One data point.

As for WPI, while I am a fan of the IQP experience, my daughter’s days to day experience there is still quite traditional. She goes to class where she listens to a lecture, does a lot of homework, studies for quizzes, midterms and finals. Some courses have included substantial projects, but most have not. Last term, she was on a team that completed a project for a Boston Hospital. The sponsor attended project presentations and provided feedback. It was challenging to do such a large project on top of the regular class work associated with the course. The course material is known to be challenging in and of itself. She still had lectures, homework, quizzes, a midterm and a final for that class. In my estimation, the WPI curriculum is still pretty traditional.

@eyemgh @ucbalumnus
Yes, a highly developed and researched program which integrates disciplines and projects is very hard to find. There are only two schools that I am aware of that build their programs around the “project” concept for all of their students (WPI and Olin)… The application of “hands on” is more complicated than access to machinery, but such access can help. I did not intend to imply that classroom lecture format is obsolete and that “projects” were “all the rage” today, but interest is strong and I believe growing. The “NEET” program at MIT illustrates this point (see http://neet.mit.edu/) and emphasizes the interdisciplinary goals of these experiences and states “NEET is a student-focused endeavor. It is based on principles that capture student and societal needs, and faculty values.” They piloted this program in 2017. It was the covert story on their “Tech” magazine. To me, It sounds like WPI’s IQP.

First heard about Harvey Mudd in 1976. A recently retired WPI president (Hazzard) had just returned from a conference at Harvey Mudd and was very excited about their program and philosophy because of their creative focus on a broadly educated engineer. Their Junior/Senior year project sounds like a heavy duty “capstone” experience which emphasizes the cross-disciplinary nature of the engineering fields. This integration of disciplines also carries into the design of their classroom format. They clearly emphasize the project aspect of their program “The philosophy of the engineering program at Harvey Mudd College is based on the recognition that there is a professional component that is best addressed through practice gained by working on real problems.” The “common core” curriculum sounds a great deal like the traditional engineering school distribution requirements, “but Harvey Mudd fosters collaboration, not competition—students work in teams and learn together. The hands-on, project-based courses in the Core foster a love for collaboration, communication skills and leadership ability.” Teamwork is emphasized here.

Classroom lecture format is familiar to both student and instructor It is cost effective and does not require a challenging political shift. WPI has not thrown it out. They have accomplished major pedagogical adjustments to the vehicle and contributed significantly to the process. Is the most widely known and popular product always the best?

:bz

The quality of education at Trinity’s BSES program is impeccable. Boneh3ad, you seem rather dismissive and discouraging of our program (in this thread and others) and I’m curious what experiences you have with Trinity Engineering students in particular and graduates that justify that opinion, because my experiences as a student here speak far to the contrary.