I definitely think Georgia Tech gives a “typical college experience” - although through a STEM lens. ACC division 1 sports, hundreds of clubs, residential for first year students, almost no one commutes, Greek life, etc. Pretty comparable to UGA down the road in those respects as well as UVA. Would agree different from CMU, MIT, and others you mentioned though.
Another factor was that he didn’t apply to any state schools that were cut from the same cloth as his own state flagship, Oregon State, unless they were highly discounted through WUE. That left out all the UCs, Michigan, Purdue etc.
He did end up at a CA public, but Cal Poly is very different than most. The classes are all small, and professor taught, including labs and discussions. The Calculus series for example is capped at 35 students. Physics…42. All of the facilities are for undergrads. I could go on, but this isn’t about that.
So, circling back around, it’s important for each individual student to define what’s important to them.
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No Iowa State? I can usually count on you to root for the Cyclones 
!
I like Iowa State…a lot. In fact my uncle who was an academic engineer with a PhD from Stanford said he felt they produced better practicing engineers than Stanford.
That said, it’s still a flagship with bigger lectures and TAs, and not in WICHE. In our son’s specific case it didn’t make sense over Oregon State and Utah.
Still…Go Cyclones! 
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This post in the GT forum addresses @Bufflea’s concerns about student happiness and campus safety and may be of interest to others in this thread.
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This is what I am consistently hearing about Stanford… people say access to VC funding is “spoiling” kids from concentrating on engineering and diverting them to entrepreneurship…
The tradeoff between an engineering focused school like GT vs a smaller engineering focus like at UVA . The larger school will have critical mass to do bigger group projects. As an example Cornell has an SAE racing team. Princeton does not. You need a large enough department so as to have a critical mass of kids interested in doing big projects. If the mech engg department is altogether some 50 kids, for example, some of these larger projects won’t happen. Conversely at UVA you will be exposed to other types of kids that are going into government, policy, banking etc.
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UVA has an SAE Aero Design Club that competes. Hoos Flying. Also, many other engineering clubs.
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Looks like there are plenty of club opportunities.
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It goes even beyond that. It’s not just the type of clubs, but the impact the clubs have. I would recommend following the Yellow Jacket space club on Instagram as an example. They just went to the Mojave desert to launch a rocket. Their goal is to be the first collegiate Club to send a rocket to space. After Milestone Launch, Yellow Jacket Space Program Is Shooting for the Stars | News Center
This is one example of many elite level clubs available at Georgia Tech. It really is a special place.
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You bring up an important point about critical mass of students. This was something the mechanical engineering department at Georgia Tech mentioned during our admitted students tour. Apparently, Georgia Tech is number two in the country for undergraduate mechanical engineering. Number one in the country is MIT. Georgia Tech has about 1800 mechanical engineers in their undergraduate program. MIT has less than 400. Not only does this have an impact on what is done on an undergraduate level, but also impacts how many mechanical engineers each university is putting out into the universe and the impact there.
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Many schools have rocketry programs, and robust ones at that.
Typically 150 teams give or take compete at SAC every year. Georgia Tech historically has a strong program, but is in no way unique. They won the off the shelf 30K competition in 2019. They haven’t won or been runner up in any category since. Last year Case, Kent State and Montreal won the 10K categories and Sydney, West Virginia and Tennessee won the 30K versions.
UVA has a rocketry club, but it’s not nearly as big as Georgia Tech’s. Still, it’s not as if there’s no opportunity there. There might be more though. According to that article, there are 250 students in the GT club.
GT also won’t be the first to reach the Kármán line either. USC did it in 2019.
This is in no way a denigration of Georgia Tech. It’s an affirmation that there are LOTS of cool things going on at many schools out there. There are very few schools providing completely unique opportunities to students.
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UVA might be closer than GT but it probably would take you longer to get to UVA. Look at direct flights to Atlanta. My son flies home often enough. 90 minutes direct and easy to get to and from the airport.
I’m not so sure about safety. UVA has been in the headlines. GT’s campus is safe. Like any other urban school you need to be situational aware.
There is pressure at GT but the reason why the average grad takes 5 years is because a lot of kids intern and co-op.
To take that one further - Caltech is the feeder school for JPL. NASA and other places stand in line to recruit these students. There re fewer undergrads at Caltech than there are students in this major.
Size is a lot less important than the mission of a school, and how much the school has adhered to the mission. GTech, VTech, Purdue, Caltech, etc, were established to teach engineering and tech. This was their focus, and still is. UVA, like other colleges established between the 17th and early 19th centuries, were established to provide an education for the children of the ruling class, and select kids from the lower and middle classes, to elevate these “exceptional cases” to the ruling class.
Their idea of a “rounded education” was aimed at the idea that a “gentleman” has a well-rounded education. At that period, engineers were professional class - since they worked with their hands, they could not be considered “gentlemen”. The USA left that idea behind mid 19th century, partly because of the fact that the military started training officers in engineering (West Point was the first engineering school in the USA), and partly under the influence of more egalitarian ideas from France, which was establishing the Polytechnics. This was solidified by the Morrill Act in 1862.
Many of the older universities simply added on engineering, and never really incorporated it into their universities. Harvard, which established its engineering school in 1847, still keeps it as a separate undergrad entity from “Harvard College”. UVA had engineering relatively early, but it didn’t take off until the processes mentioned above made engineering a more “respectable” career, and a popular major.
Bottom line, as a rule, the best engineering schools are either at land-grant universities and schools established as a “Polytechnic” or “Institute of Technology” (or something similar).
One exception is Stanford, but that is because Stanford was specifically established using a land-grant university as its model. Stanford was modelled after Cornell, not after Harvard or Yale.
PS. CMU was established as Carnegie Technical Schools, and later, the Carnegie Institute of Technology.
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I’ll get hammered for saying this. Please don’t let this degenerate into a evidenceless flame war. This is our family’s anecdote from the perspective of insiders. I’m sure there are many who loved Caltech. It’s simply to say that no one, and I literally mean NO one, has a lock on producing the best engineers.
When my son was looking at schools he was advised by two retired Caltech/JPL professors. Both, independently, told him not to apply to Caltech, because the bulk of his instruction would be by graduate students. They both raved about the PhD program, but one though frankly said “Caltech is not an undergraduate institution.” One of them managed one of the biggest JPL projects of all time and took it one step further. He could hire engineers from anywhere in the world, and they’d jump at the opportunity. He said there was literally no correlation between who his best engineers were and where they did their undergrad, saying “Some of my very best engineers went to PudunkU and some of the most pedestrian were educated at my institution.”
At the end of the day, engineering at the undergraduate level is all above horsepower, drive and curiosity. If you look at the very elite engineering teams, and my son has been on two, there is no rhyme or reason linking who is on the team and where they went to undergrad.
I do think there is some truth here, but people take it too far based on rankings. There are great engineers coming out of Iowa State, New Mexico Tech, and Michigan Tech, to name but a few. We tend to focus, with no objective basis on the rankings.
I will also agree with this, but it has to be heavily caveated. Many of or “top” institutions are focussed on research at the PhD level. The undergraduate experience suffers. I think Virginia Tech and Purdue are both good examples of schools that have maintained an appropriate attention on undergrads. Then there’s a whole class that the rankings essentially ignore, that produce great engineers, at don’t offer PhDs. Harvey-Mudd, Rose Hulman, Cal Poly and Olin are all fine examples.
EDIT: According to JPL’s linkedIn page, the schools that their employees were educated at is as follows:
USC 515
Cal Poly 476
UCLA 432
Caltech 265
Cal State Northridge 265
Yes and no. there are exceptions, which is why I wrote “as a rule”, and I will continue to recommend HMC over many of these colleges as a better undergraduate place. But HMC is a rare case - very few schools with strong engineering offerings are undergraduate focussed.
Overall, the colleges you presented as being great teaching places are also in that category.
Purdue - land grant
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (also a land grant university)
California Polytechnic State University
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Franklin Olin College of Engineering (falls under “something similar”, I think).
So the vast majority of their workers are either from a land grant, a Polytech, or a “Institute of Technology”.
Moreover, in 2020, 65 student graduated from Caltech with a BS in engineering, versus 510 who graduated from USC. A student graduating from Caltech is more than 4x as likely to end up working at JPL than a graduate of USC. Considering that 40% of Caltech graduates go off to do a PhD, the number of available undergrad from Caltech is likely even lower, though the Caltech employees may include people with PhDs.
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Are you sure you remember this conversation correctly? Graduate students at Caltech don’t teach classes (they may lead recitation sessions). Caltech has more teaching faculty members, relative to the size of its student body, than any other college, if I recall correctly. Unlike at many other schools, having some teaching experiences isn’t an requirement for obtaining a PhD degree at Caltech.
Don’t you need to adjust the numbers based on the size of the graduating class from each school for the comparison to make any sense?
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True and true. Their point was that a lot of the learning was in labs and discussions, and professors were often inaccessible. Again, not a slam on Caltech. They’ve produced many good engineers. The same could be said about MANY well regarded institutions. The point was that no school, not even MIT, Stanford, or Caltech have a patent on producing the best engineers.
I’m not sure where that idea came from. There’s almost no other place where professors are more accessible. Because class sizes are generally small (other than a few freshman classes), professors often get to know the students well (the school even provide funds for them to get together outside of classroom settings).
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@MWolf Regarding UVA engineering history- https://engineering.virginia.edu/about
Regarding engineering students interested in a well rounded education- https://engineering.virginia.edu/future-undergrads#
Every student will have their own best fit - for some it will be one of the powerhouse land grant schools, for others it will be smaller “tech” schools, for others it will be places like UVA. And for some, it may even involve starting out in community college.
You mentioned CMU. My husband and his father were engineering graduates there. Very poor fit for my sons, socially and financially. My husband had no issue with UVA for older son, thought it was an excellent fit for him. Son got some questions from a couple others at the time about why he wasn’t going to Virginia Tech(as an instate student) if he wanted to be an engineer, but those questions did not come from us as his parents! We knew him and knew UVA was a good fit for him. He applied early and was done. His only other thoughts were a couple very top private colleges also with smaller engineering programs, that would have been much more expensive.
Younger son went to Virginia Tech in engineering. Great fit for him. Different kids, different ideas of what kind of school they wanted.
@Buflea , Good luck to your son with the decision. UVA, Georgia Tech, or Florida are all good choices, depending on what your son is looking for , cost, location, etc. Don’t let the differing comments/opinions here distract you from the task at hand-choosing the best home for your son for the next four years! Good luck with the decision!
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