We would appreciate advice about the significance of ABET accreditation for engineering majors at UC Berkeley, since some of them are not ABET accredited, or are no longer accredited (especially the joint majors).
For example, if a student graduates with the MSE / MechE joint major (previously accredited), would they be at a disadvantage in their future career compared to the ABET-accredited single major MSE or MechE?
What about the EECS major (non-accredited) or one of the joint EECS majors, if the student wants to pursue a career as an electrical engineer? Are they at a disadvantage compared to a student with an ABET-accredited EE major from another university?
I understand that ABET doesn’t matter as much for certain fields such as computer science, but I would think that it would matter for MechE and EE?
For reference, I have compiled here a list of UCB engineering majors and their current ABET status:
Single majors, currently ABET accredited:
Chemical Engineering
Civil Engineering
Industrial Engineering and Operations Research
Materials Science and Engineering
Mechanical Engineering
Nuclear Engineering
Formerly accredited joint majors (expired in 2017 or 2019):
Chemical Engineering / Materials Science and Engineering
Chemical Engineering / Nuclear Engineering
Materials Science and Engineering / Mechanical Engineering
Materials Science and Engineering / Nuclear Engineering
Mechanical Engineering / Nuclear Engineering
Single majors, never accredited (as far as I can tell):
Aerospace Engineering (this is a new major)
Bioengineering
Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences (EECS)
Energy Engineering
Engineering Math & Statistics
Engineering Physics
Environmental Engineering Science
Joint majors, never accredited (as far as I can tell):
I know that this is not the standard line here on CC, but my husband is an electrical engineer and he does lots of hiring. He has no concern about whether a school was ABET accredited. He does care whether the person he is interviewing can think through problems and answer technical questions in the interview. Coming from a “name” school like Berkeley, a lack of ABET accreditation should not be an issue for most jobs. (I don’t know about other fields! But my husband and I were just talking about this for electrical engineering yesterday.)
ETA: I should say, he is doing “high-tech” component design electrical engineering, not designing the pieces of a factory electrical engineering. Maybe it would make a difference for that?
Thanks! Thinking about what you said about Berkeley being a “name” school, I compared it with Stanford, which has only two ABET accredited majors, Civil Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. This suggests to me that accreditation might be important for a MechE, if Stanford finds it worthwhile to keep this particular accreditation current? (I do know it’s important for Civil.)
Civil and Mech E seem to be the two majors where ABET accreditation is most important to employers.
My D choose not to apply to any school that didn’t have accreditation just in case she opted to change into a major where it was necessary. (She stuck with chem e but wasn’t 100% sure when she was 17).
Just my opinion, but I worked with another engineer that was part of the engineering accreditation board, and I know how important she viewed this process from our discussions. Personally, I would not pay for my son to get a degree from a non-ABET program nor would I hire one over others from a better and qualified program. Too much time and money invested, too many qualified programs, to bother with that chance.
Other historically accredited single majors were mineral engineering and naval architecture (no longer offered, although there are buildings whose names refer to those majors).
Thanks! Do you know anything about why they allowed the accreditation of these majors to lapse?
I can make a guess at EECS (it is a very flexible curriculum and I am guessing they want to keep it that way), but I am a bit puzzled by the joint majors, since it seems like it might affect someone who wants to be a practicing MechE, for example.
In the past, it looks like the joint majors were accredited for both components of each major.
Caltech is another school of this nature; it maintains ABET accreditation for mechanical engineering only, having recently dropped it for chemical engineering and electrical engineering (it does not offer civil engineering).
EECS was very flexible when it was ABET accredited. However, looking at enrollments in upper division EE (ELENG) versus CS (COMPSCI) classes at https://classes.berkeley.edu indicates that most EECS students are doing mainly CS rather than EE.
EECS majors doing EE and the joint majors’ low enrollment may have something to do with choosing not to continue ABET accreditation for them.