Do Cal Poly SLO students typically go to grad school?
How hard is it to get into a great graduate program in engineering from Cal Poly?
What are the undergraduate research opportunities like at Cal Poly?
https://careers.calpoly.edu/search.php shows where CPSLO graduates have gone afterward.
It does not appear that many CPSLO graduates go on to PhD programs, except for physics majors in some years.
CP grads do not typically go to grad school. If we define typically as more than 50%, almost no school would fall into that category. CP is lower than UCB as far as the percentage of grads that go to graduate school, but the bulk of UCB engineering grads do not go to grad school. They enter the workforce.
The real question is this, if you want to go to graduate school after CP, will you be at a disadvantage? Maybe, but probably not. If you look at all of the engineering placement surveys linked above by @ucbalumnus , you’ll see that students have gone on to well respected grad programs. If however you are applying to a program that requires that you had extensive UG research, you will be at a disadvantage. There isn’t much undergraduate research in engineering at Cal Poly.
Looking at the most recent survey, most who did advanced degrees in ME for example, stayed at CP. It is very efficient. Of the 5 who left though, two went to Carnegie Mellon, one went to Stanford, one to UCSD, and one to a CSU.
I am a College Counselor, and I can tell you that at Cal Poly SLO, research and Coops are both part of the Engineering school there. My son, a biomedical engineering major, was hired at his firm over a UC Berkeley, and USC engineering grad as he had 2 engineering projects he made for medical devices, a requirement to graduate from his program. While I do not have any hard statistics about percentages of students attending graduate school after getting their B.A. or B.S., I can tell you that his 2 best friends went to medical school and law school after they graduated. My students today who apply to UCLA and Cal Poly SLO both have the same gpa and testing profiles necessary to be admitted these days to either school.
@savvycounselor, don’t misread my statement to say that there is NO research at Cal Poly. There absolutely is. My son is a masters candidate in Mechanical Engineering. It’s just without doctoral programs, there’s FAR less going on than there is a big research universities. What is available varies pretty significantly by department. Getting involved in basic research is not really part of the undergraduate engineering culture at Poly. Some of the other basic science departments like Physics and Biochemistry are a little more research oriented.
What you mentioned is not basic research. It is practical application of scientific principles (coops and school projects). It is what Cal Poly is primarily known for, why their graduates are sought after and why my son choose it for undergrad.