My DS was accepted at CalPoly SLO, V Tech, Purdue, SDSU, UCR and WPI. He’s still waiting to hear from the rest of the UCs but I think only Berkeley would bump what he’s got so far. He’s a mechanical engineering kid. VT and Purdue do the first year engineering thing and then apply for the major. SLO, and WPI he’s in for ME. UCR admitted him straight to the BS+MS program. We are instate CA. So the CA schools are ballpark $30,000 a year. Purdue, VT and WPI are in the mid $40,000s. WPI offered $12,000 off their $60,000. He is up for a FIRST robotics scholarship at WPI that would be a full ride, but no announcement yet. Advice? Thoughts? I’m an english lit major so I’m unsure of the school name value in engineering. Are we crazy to walk away from VT and Purdue for CalPoly SLO? I mean if WPI offers full ride then great! But we can do SLO debt free… not so much the others.
Have you toured any of the schools? Cal Poly SLO is a gem of a university in the CSU system that is generally highly regarded for its STEM program. Coming from Tennessee, we have nothing truly comparable. Graduating debt-free is always a great thing. You might think about posting your question in the engineering subsection.
If I were a CA resident, I’d be thrilled to have a Cal Poly SLO acceptance. It has an excellent reputation in the STEM field. It’s a bargain for CA residents. I wouldn’t choose something else out of the state of CA unless it were MIT or it were cheaper and even then it would have to be something like the full ride to WPI. WPI, Tulane, VT aren’t going to give him a better education than Cal Poly.
What I’ve learned from having 2 kids far away in college is that there’s a lot of additional expenses, monetary and emotional, that come from not having parents close by.
I would not de facto choose UCB. I’d evaluate them on their own merits AFTER visiting them. UCB has a very good reputation, but sometimes I wonder how they came by it. Lectures can be MASSIVE. Intro to CS is the largest collegiate lecture in the nation with over 1000 students. Administration is very DMV like. The campus is amoebic and disjointed. Yes, engineers will be well educated and get good jobs if they apply themselves well, but they will at every school on your son’s list. it is not for everyone. NO school is for everyone. It’s very California to fawn over Berkeley. In multiple visits, all I can think is that the emperor has no clothes. My son said “why would I want to go to school here?” Go figure though, I love Providence, but felt the same about Brown. Yet, some kids LOVE Brown.
Thank you all! You are all pretty much confirming what we felt in our guts (my son and I). CalPoly seems pretty hard to beat. He has spent time on UCB, UCR, and Cal Poly. We will be flying to WPI (just in case that full ride comes thru - not holding my breath). We’ve done local events for Purdue and virtual tours for the others. There is also the added beni that CalPoly will accept all his AP scores (even the 3 on the first one he ever took and was a bit gobsmacked). He’d be coming in with a lot of his GEs done by AP. At close to $2000 per trip with flights and hotel we’re not sure the trip to Purdue and VT makes sense at this point. To be honest my son feels a bit guilty saying “no thank you” to schools that others really wanted and didn’t get. But I think the sooner you send that no thank you the sooner they can pull from a wait list. After all you can’t go everywhere.
@eyemgh you hit the nail on the head regarding Brown and the campus. It’s really disjointed.
Funny it’s really a bit of the opposite in RI. People locally don’t really understand why it’s such a big deal for everyone out of state.
But tell that to your kids who want to go there. Including mine. Although, I agree with my kid on this one. It’s a really a crazy good school and the kids are really off the charts talented.
Some RI humor.
“Do you know how you know someone went to Brown? They’ll tell you. “
Cal Poly sounds like the best bet due to cost and location. Since you are concerned about trip costs, I would be inclined to skip expensive visits to the OOS schools , unless more scholarship money comes through at any of them to bring the cost down to more in line with Cal Poly. I love Virginia Tech but it would be a long, complicated, costly trip from California. Good luck with the decision.
Not much. There are a handful of elites (Stanford, Caltech, MIT. etc), then a broad middle. It is broad because unlike many other majors the programs are standardized by ABET for most engineering disciplines. There are some schools less well regarded, generally because they have low bars for admission so employers figure the coursework might be softened. Rest assured Cal Poly does not fall in that group!
What is going to make your son’s future is what he does. It starts with good grades, then getting internships and perhaps also taking part in student groups related to engineering. If money is no object then go to the one he likes the best; if money matters then I’d happily go with SLO. Note that SLO also offers the 5 year MS program as do many other colleges. See https://academicprograms.calpoly.edu/content/academicpolicies/policies-undergrad/blended4plus1
@mikemac That 4+1 (or accelerated MS as some call it) was one of my son’s search criteria. And that ABET certification as well. He loved the campus of Santa Cruz but their Robotic Engineering program is not ABET credentialed so he didn’t apply. Both MIT and Stanford take the equity of your home into account for scholarship need evaluation. So those were out for us. We’ve been in our home 18 years so they seem to think we have $300,000 we can access. Not unless we sell and move to nowhere Arizona! So we will be happy with the top of that broad middle for about $40,000 less a year. Thanks so much for your thoughts! Pretty much everyone is saying what I think we already knew. But we appreciate the confirmation!
I’d say your real choices are cal poly and WPI. Cal poly is clearly the best value. WPI will bring a different type of experience - smaller classes, project based learning, etc. + New region.
@MYOS1634, certainly, WPI is unique with the 7 week terms and the qualifying projects. No school has better study abroad for engineers than WPI.
That said, classes aren’t smaller than they are at Cal Poly. There aren’t any large lecture halls in the CENG and the only large hall on campus in the B School holds 200.
Cal Poly also prides itself in experiential learning. Their motto, Discere Faciendo, translates to Learn by Doing. They do it though differently than WPI. Where as WPI incorporates lab learning for multiple subjects into two big projects, Cal Poly has labs for almost every engineering class they teach. There are more than 80 discrete labs in the college of engineering alone. Classes like Vibrations and Rotational Dynamics that are typically just lecture based applied math classes, have labs at CP. Every class does until students get to graduate level classes in things like Viscous Flow and Continuum Mechanics.
There are three areas where WPI is superior. Off campus housing is cheap in Worcester and astronomical in SLO. Administrative bloat will also be worse at Cal Poly. Changing majors is easier at WPI.
5 years ago, my son narrowed down to those two schools. We know them well. In many ways they are very similar, but in many ways very different. He ultimately decided to stay on the west coast, knowing he’d have to be more self sufficient to make his own way in a larger public institution, but it wasn’t without much hand wringing.
@mikemac, I know and acknowledge that MIT, Caltech and Stanford have elite status, but I caution people not to presume that they would de facto be the best choice if they got in. They (mainly MIT and Caltech) cater to a very specific type of student. My son, knowing that, didn’t even bother to apply to either. He has a friend, a very bright kid (Rensselaer Medalist the year after my son was), who did end up at MIT and is now on a year long leave of absence, disillusioned.
Affirming what you’re saying though, my son, who was competitive to go anywhere, almost chose Utah. They have an innovative ME curriculum (spiral), good facilities, rabid fan base, he got great money, and he’s been a lifelong skier.
According to the CDS for each of these institutions student to faculty ratios are:
Cal Poly: 19 to 1;
WPI 13 to 1.
For ABET accredited degrees, both universities are required to satisfactory complete a project, often called a “capstone” experience in their major, toward the end of their studies.
WPI also has a second project called the IQP. The “project” activities are done in teams of usually 3 to 6 students. The nature of the IQP, undergraduate research on real interdisciplinary problems, requires a great deal of student/faculty/team interaction. The IQP is often completed in year three. There is a third, 18 semester hour study which focuses in the humanities. while the IQP incorporates a lot of the social sciences.
Neither university appears to fit the large lecture hall mold.
There is a first year program at WPI called the Great Problems Seminar (GPS), an optional two-course introduction to university-level research and project work that focuses on important problems facing the world, from food and energy to health and learning. This is a larger, lecture hall format, taught by an interdisciplinary team where students are introduced topics they may focus on within their own subgroups. For greater detail see https://www.wpi.edu/academics/undergraduate/great-problems-seminar. It is about getting you “researching feet” wet.
While starting point, you can get more specific information about what class size will be like by planning out a mock schedule and then looking up class sizes in the current Schedule of Classes. For most majors colleges have sample schedules to the degree, then you can look up the classes
For Cal Poly the classes are listed in https://pass.calpoly.edu/main.html It’s a bit awkward, you need to select the classes and then pick a section to see the class sizes
For WPI I wasn’t able to quickly find a schedule of classes online that gives enrollment per section
@mikemac
In a system where the education is comprised of a distribution of proscribed courses and lectures followed by smaller discussion groups the 'planning of mock schedule approach" makes sense The WPI system does not work that way as 18 semester hours of activity are small team research groups of (usually) three to six students working on a problem with co-workers and their faculty advisor as required for advice and direction It is not the regular classroom lecture, discussion format. They have either had, or are concurrently taking some related background coursework.
For some years the academic buildings library, laboratories, workshops and even dormitories have been designed and remolded around this structure.
How does one count that student/faculty ratio. It is even harder to calculate when the program is at Olin College. See http://olin.edu/. Its is more like graduate studies/research than the familiar classroom structure. Oxford and Cambridge Universities have used it for hundreds of years.
The equivalent of 18 semester hours of required academic activity is actually research not defined in a set classroom schedule. When a student is doing research at one of the 50 plus off campus project centers, the student to faculty ratios are very low.
To my knowledge, the largest lectures are the Great Problems Seminar (GPS) cited at #11.
The closest I can get to the “mock schedule” approach on the WPI website is @ https://www.wpi.edu/offices/registrar/course-registration/schedules. The student to faculty ratios given above are generated by the same set of CDS guidelines.
I like your methodology @mikemac. CDS data is easily manipulated.
I’ve asked my son in the past how many students there were in his classes and he’d always replied with a non-committal “not many.” I eventually figured they were typically 25-40. For fun, I looked some up. Figuring they were the most introductory, I looked up Calc I and Physics I, 35 and 48 respectively. Statics…35. Fluid Dynamics II…35. A few grad classes he took…35. That’s max seats available. Some sections don’t fill.
So, I think it’s safe to say, that for a big engineering program (ME alone has over 1100 undergrads), they have small classes, from the get go. That’s fairly unique as usually it requires a small school to have small classes.
Cool trick!
One of my son’s search criteria was stress load… He is by no means looking for “easy.” He thrives on challenge and has always worked VERY hard. But he found several articles on student mental health at both MIT and Georgia Tech. (https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/03/16/suicide-rate-mit-higher-than-national-average/1aGWr7lRjiEyhoD1WIT78I/story.html) here’s one… Yes there is a definite purpose to college, but he wasn’t interested in those “dog eat dog” environments. He was looking for a collaborative rather than hyper-competitive environment. Don’t get me wrong - he fully expects to be stressed out with tests and schedules but MIT just wasn’t for him.
@RoboticsWidow, that was a criteria for my son too. There are schools known as “grinds.” We all figured, if you knew in advance, and you had high quality alternatives that weren’t grinds, why choose that experience?
The student at my son’s school who was the Rensselaer Medalist the year after my son did went to MIT. He’s now on a year long leave of absence, disillusioned, trying to figure out what to do next.
Choose primarily by fit and finances. Don’t over think it at the undergraduate level. Support, ABET accreditation, good employment outcomes are always good. My sons are 5th generation engineers (thank you genealogy sites). My private school engineer husband had no problem with our sons going to public schools. My kids had zero interest in heavily tech type schools. Wonderful for lots of kids but not them. Know your kid and your finances and it will be fine.
DS made his final decision! He chose the ME at Cal Poly over acceptances to Berkeley, UCI, UCSD, UCSB, UCR, Virginia Tech, Purdue, and WPI. Visiting each campus just solidified that if you want hands on in engineering Cal Poly is pretty hard to beat. We are excited!
Congratulations!