…so, what are we all doing here? 
For non-civil engineering, a few schools choose not to seek or retain ABET accreditation:
- Washington and Lee University: probably because the emphasis there is more Wall Street.
- Stanford, Caltech for some majors: probably because they believe that their engineering prestige is enough, and relatively few of their graduates go into PE-requiring work.
- Brown, Dartmouth BA engineering majors: probably because those majors are chosen by Wall Street and consulting hopefuls. They also offer ABET accredited engineering majors with additional requirements for those who actually want to work in engineering.
On the other hand, colleges starting new engineering major bachelor’s degree programs for students who want to work in engineering afterward typically do target seeking and retaining ABET accreditation for those programs. Exceptions of the above type are rare.
For CS, the situation is somewhat messier. Some schools’ CS departments choose to get ABET accreditation (e.g. MIT), while others do not (e.g. CMU). For the latter, individual evaluation of the program needs to be done, since there can be very good programs, but also very poor or limited programs (e.g. some LACs where the number of CS faculty and upper level CS course offerings is very small).
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Seems like when “instructors with terminal degrees” is mentioned, it is usually in the context of not wanting to have instructors who are TAs who are graduate (or sometimes advanced undergraduate) students who have not completed whatever degree they are intending to finish with.
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The implication seemed to be that top USNWR schools use TAs to teach actual classes. Is that really the case anywhere?
Could my engineering kid have gotten into Cornell? Maybe. And they would have given us enough need-based aid to put it within budget. Importantly, he didn’t want to go to Cornell (or the like). He’s at a much lower ranked university nearby because that’s what he wanted. And ABET-accreditation was the main factor he used to make his college list.
Then again, he has no desire to work at a FAANG/Tesla-type company (or Raytheon or Lockheed for that matter).
Not everyone aspires to the top-ranked schools and/or the biggest-name companies. Even those that are capable of reaching such heights (like @eyemgh 's kid and perhaps mine). There are various reasons why. So no, maybe not “good enough for everyone, everywhere”, but good enough for the big majority, I’d guess.
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They don’t use TAs, who are, by definition, teaching assistants. Some (not all) of them use graduate students who have not earned their terminal degrees as the instructor of record.
I did my undergrad at a state flagship (I don’t know if it meets your definition of “top”). I had several PhD students teaching me intro courses.
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Yes, lectures, discussions and labs. I don’t know of any credible program that uses grad students to lecture.
That’s not to say that you can’t get a good, even a great education with 500 student lectures (or bigger), that TA’s can’t be great teachers or that professors won’t be horrible instructors. It’s about differences in style at the margins and belief that those stylistic differences will make a tangible, positive impact on preparation to enter the workforce.
BTW, I wanted to read your link, but it led to internship posts on levels.fyi.
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eyemgh contrasted his son’s college to “top USNWR programs”. I don’t know what he meant specifically, but there are some flagships that are clearly top, and some (including our own) that clearly aren’t.
For what it’s worth, all but one of DS’s intro classes at MIT (that he didn’t test out of) were taught by PhD-educated instructors, the remaining one having been taught by a senior lecturer with MIT’s Master’s of Engineering (MEng).
Based on some cursory googling, UCLA, Berkeley, Michigan, and U of Virginia all have at least some intro courses taught (i.e., lecture) by graduate students. I think this is the case at most huge publics.
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Well I wouldn’t expect a PhD student to be an instructor of record for any classes at MIT or any other elite privates. They don’t even teach at most non-elite privates.
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The whole CC fetish for avoiding TA’s and adjuncts gets a “yes, but…” in my book.
I had absolutely inspirational adjuncts in grad school (one of whom also taught undergrads). This was not someone who was piecing together a living by teaching at 6 different institutions and grading papers in his car- this was an “industry star” who was giving back by teaching at his alma mater. The others were less famous- but arguably the top practicioners in their field.
So not every adjunct is created equal.
Ditto for TA’s and grad students. Like professors- some are born to teach, and are masters at communicating their passion, the complexity and the nuances of their field-- complete with pathos and drama and excitment. And some are not.
But evaluating an entire institution on the basis of “does every instructor have a terminal degree” is really missing the forest for the trees. College is not a work training program where the instructor exists to deliver the content a kid will need on the job a few months after graduation. That’s 10% of it. The 90% is teaching the analytical, creative and contextual skills to make someone a lifelong learner in the field, or someone who is passionate about pushing the envelope intellectually.
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Again, not bashing MIT. Rensselaer Medalists (as is he) on both sides of him from his high school went to MIT. He just didn’t want to go to a dedicated tech school like MIT, Caltech or CMU.
Our state flagship is one of those you might refer as not clearly top. One of his friends did his ME undergrad there and is not in grad school at MIT.
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Yes, that is where it leads. Those internships, if one is successful, parlay into full time offers that are, as a general rule of thumb, about twice the pay level of an intern (but there’s not a single list like that, so this internships list is a useful proxy).
If you pick several well-known companies from the top of that list and look at their feeder schools on Linkedin, you will find few surprises:
https://■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/company/citadel-llc/people/
https://■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/company/jane-street-global/people/
https://■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/company/fiverings/people/
https://■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/company/two-sigma-investments/people/
etc.
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This is simply not true. I went to an Ivy as an undergrad. In one of my majors, it was very common for Ph.D. students in that department to teach a seminar of their own design – I honestly don’t know if this was part of a teaching fellowship, or if it was required as part of a professional development element of the program, but a lot of the advanced seminars were taught by Ph.D. students and took up core issues in their own research. For my Ph. D., I attended a top 20 program in my discipline (large public, not Ivy, but stronger than some Ivies in my area of study). Ph. D. students occasionally taught classes there, too – sometimes taking on a course when a professor was on sabbatical, sometimes as part of a prestigious fellowship that included a one-course teaching assignment. In all of these examples, the doctoral student was the instructor of record, and the universities provided these opportunities in part to give their students essential experience prior to going on the job market.
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Just throwing in my two cents on the topic of TAs and teaching, I’ve heard that with the high demand and low supply of CS profs generally, sometimes the prof may not be a talented teacher, but the TA can a huge help for students, a lifesaver, so much so that I wonder if there’s variation in quality of TAs across different types of institutions.
Okay, sorry about that. In my experience it’s much less common for grad students to teach as instructor of record at privates vs publics. Especially for large-ish intro classes. I didn’t know that it was as common as it apparently is at privates (most of my private experience is with SLACs).
I do know that it’s pretty common at publics of all types. When I was a PhD student at a non-elite school (but was highly-regarded for the niche I was in), I was shocked that I was asked to teach as instructor of record for a full 4-credit (non-seminar) upper-division course. I turned it down because I was trying to finish my dissertation on a tight deadline.
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Might I remind members of the forum rules: “Our forum is expected to be a friendly and welcoming place, and one in which members can post without their motives, intelligence, or other personal characteristics being questioned by others."
and
“College Confidential forums exist to discuss college admission and other topics of interest. It is not a place for contentious debate. If you find yourself repeating talking points, it might be time to step away and do something else… If a thread starts to get heated, it might be closed or heavily moderated.”
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Being ABET-accredited is like hitting above the Mendoza line (0.200) in Major League Baseball. You could be designated for assignment anytime, or you could be a perennial all-star. It’s not saying much when a school is said to be ABET-accredited. A school really has to have some dubious, bordering-on-diploma-mill engineering programs to not be ABET accredited. Or a school that is so well-regarded that it doesn’t need ABET’s blessing (preparing for an ABET visit is a pain in the a** — just ask any faculty unfortunate enough to be assigned the task). But on CC such an accreditation is treated by some as hitting above 0.250, instead of the barely passable 0.200.
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AHHH, got you. You’re reverse engineering from companies on levels to LinkedIn. The only flaw with that is that it is impacted by the size of programs. Schools like Brown, Rose, Olin, HMU, etc. will never show up as they don’t dump hundreds of grads into the market every year.
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