Engineering at Swarthmore

Colleges and Universities A-Z Swarthmore College
1

<p>I just got accepted at Swarthmore. Is Swarthmore good for engineering? I will be studying engineering (either chemical or mechanical) and heard that they only give a general engineering degree. Is it any good? I also saw the rankings and Swarthmore's engineering is ranked surprisingly lower than other liberal arts colleges. I also got accepted in Bucknell and Northeastern and am giving more thought of joining either of those two.</p>

<p>Also, what is the demand for Swarthmore engineering grads?</p>

2

<p>No offense intended to Bucknell or Northeastern, but they aren't even on the same page as Swarthmore, either in terms of academics or prestige in the academic community.</p>

<p>The perception of the three schools on an overall basis would be:</p>

<p>Swarthmore
Bucknell
Northeastern</p>

<p>They are very different schools. Swarthmore is very small with under 1500 students, characterized by incredibly small class sizes and a high degree of interaction between students and professors. Bucknell is a large liberal arts college with 3500 students. Northeastern is a large urban school (14,000 students) with a significant commuter population (i.e. students not living on campus)</p>

<p>As for engineering, Swarthmore's engineering department has been in existence for about 125 years and is ABET-accredited. It is superb, but very difficult academically.</p>

<p>You are correct. At Swarthmore, you major in Engineering and get a Bachelor of Science degree in General Engineering. Although you do concentrate in specific field of engineering (Chemical, Mechanical, etc.) you do not get a specialized degree in a sub-field of engineering. In that sense, the program is similar to the program at schools like Dartmouth. Swarthmore's program gives you a broad foundation across all fields of engineering along with preparation in other fields such as writing, critical thinking, communication that is second to none.</p>

<p>If you are looking at college as the last step in your education, i.e. going straight into engineering job as a Mechanical engineer or Chemical engineer with a large engineering firm, then a more specialized vocational undergrad engineering school makes sense and I would consider Bucknell over Northeastern for that, all things being equal.</p>

<p>If you are considering going on to grad school for either a Masters (career oriented) or PhD (research oriented) in engineering or a career that combines engineering with management or entreprenurship or technology law or technology oriented banking or whatever, then Swarthmore's program would be excellent. It's ideal for students who want to study engineering and still get a broader education. Swarthmore puts engineering majors into the very top research oriented PhD programs.</p>

<p>Understand that the Swarthmore engineering program is very small -- 15 to 25 majors per year. It is very hands-on and heavily focused around individual mentoring from engineering professors. You would almost certainly be hired as a research assistant with one of your professors at some point in your four years at Swarthmore. For example, Swarthmore's robots team has consistently placed and won a national competition in AI robots in recent years. All Swarthmore engineering majors do elaborate senior design projects.</p>

<p>There is a lot of information here:</p>

<p><a href="http://www.engin.swarthmore.edu/%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.engin.swarthmore.edu/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>I would recommend e-mailing the head of the department if you have questions.</p>

<p>I'm not an expert on engineering. But, of the three schools you list, I would choose Swarthmore if you want one of the best undergrad educations in the world. I would choose Bucknell if you want a more specialized degree in a more vocationally oriented engineering program. In all honesty, I don't think Northeastern is in the same league.</p>

3

<p>jeeshan--</p>

<p>ID gives a lot of useful information, but one correction. Swat offers only a limited number of engineering specializations, NOT including chemical engineering. Some students have explored the possibility of taking chemical engineering courses at Penn (which offers cross-registration) but the logistics--because of scheduling labs--have precluded that, at least for the people I know about. </p>

<p>So if you are sure you want chemical engineering Swat would not really work for you. </p>

<p>ID is right that the group is small. They try to have 30+ potential engineers in each incoming class, but my son's class (class of 2007) has only 13 last I heard. Engineers typically switch out to become physics majors, or CS, or even political science!</p>

4

<p>Thanks for the correction. The four areas of concentration are Mechanical, Electrical, Computer, Civil/Environmental. However, you could probably put together programs with engineering/chemistry or engineering/bio. </p>

<p>If the poster goes to the link for the Swat engineering department and drills down to the Academics link, there are descriptions of typical elective concentrations under the "Course Major" heading. There are also sample E90 Senior Design project papers.</p>

5

<p>Sounds to me that if you really want to be a real, live, practicing engineeer, Swarthmore is probably the LAST place you'd want to go. If you want to be an engineering professor who teaches engineering but has never actually worked as an engineer, then yeah, Swarthmore rules!</p>

6

<p>I don't think Swarthmore would be the "last place" to consider for a top education in almost any field.</p>

<p>I do agree that, if you know you want four years of engineering college, followed by recruitment into an engineering cubicle, where you will work 'til retirement, Swarthmore is probably not the most vocationally-minded school.</p>

<p>However, if you read through the engineering alumni profiles here:</p>

<p><a href="http://www.engin.swarthmore.edu/AlumProfiles/AlumProfiles.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.engin.swarthmore.edu/AlumProfiles/AlumProfiles.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>You will find high percentage of working engineers in many diverse fields -- from software design at Amazon.com to autonomous underwater robots. You will also find a lot of Swarthmore grads in Masters and PhD programs -- from Berkeley to MIT.</p>

<p>One of the more interesting Swat engineering alums is Patrick Aluwah '89. He came to Swarthmore from Ghana. Did a joint major in engineering and economics. Went to work for Microsoft. Made a killing in Microsoft stock options and after eight years, retired and moved to Ghana where he founded the first liberal arts college in his home country. Sounds like a pretty rewarding career path to me, but it's probably not for everybody.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.swarthmore.edu/news/meaning/awuah.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.swarthmore.edu/news/meaning/awuah.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

7

<p>"In all honesty, I don't think Northeastern is in the same league."</p>

<p>I think that the engineers at Raytheon, EMC, Cognex, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin would take issue with that statement. Northeastern happens to have a very strong engineering program and many of its graduates end up in top positions at this firms. Nothing against SWAT, but it is primarily a liberal arts college. SWAT's entire engineering department consists of 8 faculty members:</p>

<p><a href="http://www.engin.swarthmore.edu/faculty/index.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.engin.swarthmore.edu/faculty/index.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Northeastern has over 150 engineering faculty members spread among four departments. But the real kicker is that Northeastern has over 600 employers in 33 states in its #1 rated co-op program:</p>

<p><a href="http://www.coe.neu.edu/prospective/index.phtml?go=coop.htm%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.coe.neu.edu/prospective/index.phtml?go=coop.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>And if you look at the new Carnegie Research Classifications, Northeastern is rated as an institution with "high research activity." Swat is well, you guessed it, classified as small four year college without any reference at all to research.</p>

<p>So you're right, SWAT and NEU are not in the same league only not the way that you suggested. </p>

<p>I hope this clears up the confusion.</p>

8

<p>Maximus:</p>

<p>Disregarding differences in cost after scholarships (i.e. a free ride at one school), I doubt that one student in 100 years has chosen Northeastern over Swarthmore for a field that is offered at both schools. It's like asking, "where should I go for the same money, Boston University or Princeton"?</p>

<p>Bucknell is a little tougher. While it is not in the same category as Swarthmore for the overall undergrad education, it does offer a larger engineeering program with specialized engineering degrees. So, I would have to hear a little more about the applicant before saying categorically whether Bucknell or Swarthmore would make more sense.</p>

<p>If you step back and look at the big picture -- academic reputation, faculty, faculty-student ratios, per student spending -- this is not even a close close call. Just look at the applicant pools for the three schools (median SATs and acceptance rates would be a good place to start). </p>

<p>I live in Massachusetts. I understand that Northeastern is making strides in putting itself on the map and their co-op program where students study and work at the same time is an innovative idea. But, you are comparing a school that would be on everyone's list of top dozen or two colleges and unversities in the country academically.</p>

9

<p>Interestedad,</p>

<p>I quite aware of the fact that Swarthmore is one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country. It easily blows Northeastern away when it comes to the study of humanities or the social sciences. But we are talking about engineering here. Northeastern wipes the floor with Swarthmore in terms of the breadth of its academic offerings, size and quality of its engineering faculty, quality of its engineering facilities, and its receipt of sponsored research grants. </p>

<p>BTW, the student faculty ratios and spending per student numbers that appear in the U.S. News Rankings are not accurate. This is because the magazine assumes that all students are on campus taking classes and using resources. This is far from the case, becasuse a large portion of the upperclassmen are off campus co-oping at companies. Students who are on co-op should be excluded because they do not pay tuition and are not on campus. In reality, Northeastern should be ranked much higher.</p>

10

<p>Maximus:</p>

<p>Yes. Swarthmore is very strong in humanities and social sciences. You may not be as familiar with its strengths in the sciences. You may not know that only five colleges and universities in the United States produces more future science, math, and engineering PhDs per 1000 graduates than Swarthmore -- and three of those are pure tech schools (CalTech, Harvey Mudd, and MIT). Interestingly, the President of CalTech, Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry David Baltimore, is a Swarthmore alumni.</p>

<p>Here's the top-28:</p>

<p>PhDs per 1000 graduates </p>

<p>Academic field: All Engineering, Hard Science, and Math </p>

<p>PhDs and Doctoral Degrees: ten years (1994 to 2003) from NSF database<br>
Number of Undergraduates: ten years (1989 to 1998) from IPEDS database<br>
Formula: Total PhDs divided by Total Grads </p>

<p>Note: Does not include colleges with less than 1000 graduates over the ten year period<br>
Note: Includes all NSF doctoral degrees inc. PhD, Divinity, etc., but not M.D. or Law. </p>

<p>1 California Institute of Technology 34%
2 Harvey Mudd College 24%
3 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 16%
4 Reed College 10%
5 Rice University 9%
6 Swarthmore College 8%
7 Princeton University 8%
8 Carleton College 7%
9 New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology 7%
10 University of Chicago 7%
11 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 7%
12 Case Western Reserve University 7%
13 Harvard University 6%
14 Carnegie Mellon University 6%
15 Johns Hopkins University 6%
16 Haverford College 6%
17 Grinnell College 6%
18 Cornell University, All Campuses 6%
19 Kalamazoo College 5%
20 Stanford University 5%
21 Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology 5%
22 Yale University 5%
23 Cooper Union 5%
24 Oberlin College 5%
25 Lawrence University 5%
26 Bryn Mawr College 5%
27 Williams College 5%
28 Pomona College 5%</p>

<p>Having said that, Swarthmore is definitely an academically-inclined school. Its science and engineering majors are very likely to go on to grad school or med school at unusually high rates.</p>

11

<p>
[quote]
Northeastern wipes the floor with Swarthmore in terms of the breadth of its academic offerings, size and quality of its faculty, quality of its engineering facilities, and its receipt of sponsored research grants.

[/quote]
All true. Yet Swarthmore outperforms Northeastern in at least one noteworthy respect: generating engineering PhDs.</p>

<p>From "Baccaulaureate</a> Origins of Doctoral Recipients":</p>

<p>Engineering PhDs, 1986-1995, w/ Northeastern BS degree: 91
Engineering PhDs, 1986-1995, w/ Swarthmore BS degree: 36</p>

<p>Note that Swarthmore only produces ~ 20 BS engineers a year, whereas Northeastern produces several hundred. There is no doubt that Swarthmore grads earn PhDs at a much higher rate. If you want to pursue a career in in engineering academia (and I grant that most engineers do not), then Swarthmore is the better choice.</p>

12

<p>Here are the per capita production numbers for Engineering PhDs:</p>

<p>Number of PhDs per 1000 graduates </p>

<p>Academic field: All Engineering </p>

<p>PhDs and Doctoral Degrees: ten years (1994 to 2003) from NSF database<br>
Number of Undergraduates: ten years (1989 to 1998) from IPEDS database<br>
Formula: Total PhDs divided by Total Grads, multiplied by 1000 </p>

<p>Note: Does not include colleges with less than 1000 graduates over the ten year period </p>

<p>1 California Institute of Technology 109
2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 65
3 Harvey Mudd College 52
4 Cooper Union 39
5 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 37
6 Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology 28
7 Carnegie Mellon University 28
8 University of Missouri, Rolla 26
9 Case Western Reserve University 26
10 Colorado School of Mines 26
11 Rice University 24
12 Alfred University, Main Campus 22
13 Georgia Institute of Technology, Main Campus 22
14 Polytechnic University 21
15 Worcester Polytechnic Institute 21
16 Johns Hopkins University 19
17 Stevens Institute of Technology 19
18 Princeton University 18
19 Michigan Technological University 18
20 Clarkson University 16
21 Lehigh University 15
22 Illinois Institute of Technology 15
23 Cornell University, All Campuses 15
24 Swarthmore College 13
25 Stanford University 13
26 Duke University 12
27 South Dakota School of Mines & Technology 12
28 Florida Institute of Technology 12</p>

13

<p>"Note that Swarthmore only produces ~ 20 BS engineers a year, whereas Northeastern produces several hundred. There is no doubt that Swarthmore grads earn PhDs at a much higher rate. If you want to pursue a career in in engineering academia (and I grant that most engineers do not), then Swarthmore is the better choice."</p>

<p>No argument there. But if you want a career as a practicing engineer at top company like Raytheon or Lockheed Martin, then Northeastern is the better choice. Look at Raytheon's on campus recruiting list. Swarthmore is not on it:</p>

<p><a href="http://www.rayjobs.com/campus/index.cfm?Tool=EventsList%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.rayjobs.com/campus/index.cfm?Tool=EventsList&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

14

<p>Max:</p>

<p>You are aware that graduates of top colleges get jobs without going thru "career fair" in the school gymnasium, right?</p>

<p>With 1 engineering professor for every 2 engineering majors at Swarthmore, post-grad plans are more likely to emerge from professor-assisted contacts.</p>

<p>Again, Northeastern has done a fine job building up the university from its days as a night/commuter school. They are to be applauded for that.</p>

<p>But, to turn down what could arguably be one of the top-seven private colleges or universities for undergrad students in the country for the seventh best college/university in Boston would be nuts -- unless you had a very specific reason, financial or otherwise. Northeastern's acadmic reputation is just not that strong yet.</p>

<p>Bucknell is a little tougher call. While Swarthmore is clearly a better, more endowed, more prestigious college overall, the presence of specialized engineering degrees could outweigh that for some students.</p>

<p>Personally, I would come down on the side of picking the best overall undergraduate college/university in most cases, but there are exceptions to that.</p>

<p>Now....all of this does not take finances into account....</p>

15

<p>"You are aware that graduates of top colleges get jobs without going thru 'career fair' in the school gymnasium, right?"</p>

<p>Absolutely, but some grads from top colleges don't. Otherwise, MIT and Brown would not appear on Raytheon's recruiting list (they do). Northeastern grads also get jobs without ever stepping foot in the gym. In fact, nearly 50% of Northeastern grads get offers from one of their former co-op employers. The rest either have their own connections or go to the gym like some of their counterparts at MIT and Brown.</p>

<p>No doubt, Swat is a great school. But Northeastern has more to offer in an engineering education. Anyway, if the OP got into Swat, my guess is that Northeastern is probably offering him full ride. Lets see, a free education, access to great faculty and the use of state of the art facilities, wonderful internship and research opportunities, and the opportunity to study in one of the greatest cities in America (BOSTON). Sounds like an easy choice to me.</p>

16

<p>If an engineering student plans to go directly to work after college, and does not plan to get any academic qualifications other than the BS, then I would agree that a "liberal arts" engineering degree from a school like Swarthmore or Smith might not be ideal. These programs provide a strong grounding in the fundamentals, but not in the kinds of specialized training that employers are likely to look for. In this case, it might be better to enroll in a larger university engineering program, one that would offer a much broader curriculum and much better industry connections.</p>

<p>But the fact is that the engineering field -- like law and medicine before it -- is gradually moving away from the terminal bachelor's degree. The percentage of engineers with advanced degrees has been rising steadily in recent years. It's not unusual now for engineering employers and professional societies to desire the MS as an entry-level degree. And it's not unusual to combine the engineering BS with an MBA or a JD. </p>

<p>This trend is working to the advantage of schools like Swarthmore. A Swarthmore engineering BS may not be ideal as a professional degree...but it is hard to beat as a pre-professional degree. A Swarthmore degree is a ticket to top engineering graduate schools, or top business schools, or top law schools. I don't have statistics, but I would expect that Swarthmore engineering grads earn MS, MBA, and JD degrees at extraordinarily high rates, just as they do with PhDs.</p>

17

<p>Obviously, if a student has the stats and smarts to get into Swat, he should have no trouble getting into a top grad school later, no matter where he goes for undergrad. For example, If you had two students with 1400 SATs and sent one to Swat and the other to Northeastern the outcomes would likely be the same. The only difference is that the student who went to Northeastern would get more work experience (through co-op) not too mention would have no debt to pay back. The top Northeastern students have little trouble getting into top grad schools like MIT. Some examples:</p>

<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/lists/2005/54/O2YL.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.forbes.com/lists/2005/54/O2YL.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p><a href="http://www.cognex.com/corporate/biographies.asp%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.cognex.com/corporate/biographies.asp&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p><a href="http://www.engr.wisc.edu/mse/faculty/kelly_thomas.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.engr.wisc.edu/mse/faculty/kelly_thomas.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

18

<p>
[quote]
If you had two students with 1400 SATs and sent one to Swat and the other to Northeastern the outcomes would likely be the same.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I do not agree with that. The outcomes may be "equivalent" based on the intrinsic abilities of the student. However, the nature of the education and the experience at the two schools is so vastly different that two identical students would surely emerge from the two schools with very different outlooks and skillsets.</p>

<p>Going back to its days as a night school and continuing today with its emphasis on co-op work/study education, Northeastern is extremely vocational in purpose -- perhaps more vocational than any other private university in the country. Dating back to its early days, and especially to the implementation of the Honors program and the small seminar approach to education, Swarthmore perhaps defines the opposite end of the spectrum -- colleges that, above all, teach their students critical thinking and analysis, regardless of the field.</p>

<p>This discussion is really quite silly. Nobody in their right mind would choose Northeastern over Swarthmore (or any other of the top two dozen colleges and universities in the country, if the dollars are the same. This is not to say that Northeastern isn't a fine institution, but let's get real.</p>

<p>Just look at per student endowments:</p>

<p>Northeastern has a total endowment of $500 million for over 18,000 students or about $28,000 per student.</p>

<p>Swarthmore has a total endowment of $1.1 billion for just under 1500 students or about $800,000 per student. You do the math. Because of endowment spending, Swarthmore spends $69,000 per student per year (not including financial aid) and every dime of it relates to education and/or quality of life for undergrad students.</p>

19

<p>Interesteddad,</p>

<p>Interesting points. But your stats are not quite accurate. Northeastern now has an endowment of $600 million and just completed a a major fundraising campaign (the gifts are still coming in). Northeastern also brings in about $72 million a year in external research funding. Further, while it is true that there are 18,000 students (14,000 of which are ugs), not all of them are on campus at the same time taking classes. At least 50% of the upperclassmen are off interning at companies. These students should be excluded from your equation because they are not using campus resources and are not paying any tuition. In other words, Northeastern really has more money to spend on the students who are on campus taking classes. But hey, if you want to keep the students who are off campus interning in the equation, I'm all for that. But then you should factor in the amount of money that the participating companies (3000 worldwide) spend on training thousands of students every year- the numbers would be astronomical. </p>

<p>You also need to consider that Northeastern has an honors program where the average SAT range is 1350 to 1400. Many of these students had opportunities to go to places like Swat, but choose Northeastern instead because they wanted to go to a research university and get experience in their field (many of them also received full scholarships). </p>

<p>It is worth pointing out again that SWAT’s entire engineering faculty consists of 8 profs which graduates only 20 engineering majors per year. You could probably fit all of Swat’s engineering alumni in a single room. By contrast, Northeastern has 165,000 alumni, 50,000 of which are engineers. Many of these engineers are top executives at Fortune 500 companies like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, and EMC. So you’re right, the comparison is quite silly. </p>

<p>No doubt, Swat is a fine liberal arts college, but it one of the last places that most people would consider for an engineering education, unless of course it is your ultimate goal to teach engineering at an LAC.</p>

20

<p>Oh btw, Northeastern's Honors Program enrollment is about 1500 students (exactly the same size of Swat's entire student body enrollment).</p>