Has anyone seen a statistic on % of students who enter the biomedical engineering program at either UT or Michigan and end up graduating with a BME degree? I know they’re both tough programs but wondering if one does a better job than the other supporting students or keeping them in the program.
I don’t anything about the specific question. But in general, retention rate sometimes varies due to the profile of accepted students rather than the program/support.
Email each school and ask… To get the most up to date information
They’re not being terribly forthcoming :(. Anyone who has attended one or the other have a estimated percentage?
There’s a database at asee.org that contains enrollment in engineering colleges by year and degree, and degrees awarded. You should be able to get the numbers you are looking for by searching that database.
Look for American Society for Engineering Education college profiles.
The ASEE college profiles are at http://profiles.asee.org/ .
However, trying to get retention and graduation rates from the ASEE numbers may not be obvious, since incoming transfer students can increase the number of upper level students. If the school reports by class standing using amount of credit and includes AP credit in that, that is another way that biases the reported number of students to upper levels. So a large number of seniors could either be due to juniors with lots of AP credit, or actual fifth year seniors.
Thanks! Will take a look at this…
The OP’s question – "which school does a better job than the other supporting students or keeping them in the program? – is impossible to definitively answer. My boy graduated with a BSE and MSE from Michigan two years ago and he never once complained that he was unable to find help when he needed it-- whether from fellow students, TAs, or faculty. I think the same situation probably occurs at UT as well. It’s largely up to the student to seek help
Rant: I have found that the engineering departments try to weasel out of providing meaningful graduation rate info by saying their 4/5/6 year graduation rate numbers are inaccurate because many of their students do co-ops/internships/semesters abroad. This is unhelpful when most freshman scholarships are for 8 academic semesters. Anecdotally, BME does have the reputation of having one of the higher attrition rates within engineering.
2 years ago, during D2’s Purdue visit, I escalated to three separate people trying to get an 8 academic semester engineering graduation rate without success. While talking about it at lunch, an engineering student at the next table leaned over and said “50-something %, but they don’t like to talk about it.” Locally, at GaTech, a sizeable number of the in-state kids are taking the minimum 12 credit hours/semester though the weed-out course years to maintain GPA and their Hope Scholarships when you need to be taking 16-17 hours per semester to graduate in 8 semesters.
I agree that it would be more helpful if engineering schools with co-ops would give the stats for # of semesters to graduate vs years. My daughter will take 5 years to graduate because of her co-op but only 8 semesters. To me, that’s much different than families paying for 9 or 10 semesters.
I do think it’s more difficult to flush out because so many kids also take a summer course here or there to try to lighten the load, so how does that count in the numbers?
Yes, graduation rate in terms of number of semesters of school would be more helpful in many cases, including (but not limited to) students doing co-op.
UCLA does show number of quarters to degree, both elapsed (number of (apparently non-summer) academic quarters since entry, regardless of whether the student was registered that quarter) and registered (number of academic quarters in school since entry).
https://www.apb.ucla.edu/campus-statistics/graduation-ttd
For frosh entrants:
All undergraduates: 12.38 elapsed, 11.89 registered
Engineering: 12.55 elapsed, 12.21 registered
At a school with 15-week semesters, an 8-week summer session is approximately half a semester (a full time course load would be approximately half of what one would take during a fall or spring semester). On quarters, the summer is a regular size 10 week quarter.
This question has kind of veered to # semesters to graduate with the degree. I think that’s an easier question than what % of students who start in the BME program end up with a BME degree. The latter to me speaks to student support by the department, weed-out approach, etc.
In terms of years to graduate, according to the 2 schools, Michigan does a better job at getting students through the program in 4 years.
For Michigan, all frosh engineering students start as undeclared engineering and declare their majors later (and it has enough capacity in each department that students just need a 2.0 GPA / C grades to declare their majors, so no weeding by higher GPA like at Purdue, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio State, Penn State, Texas A&M, etc.). So no frosh officially start in BME, so any tracking of retention and graduation rates specific to BME would start from when BME majors declared their majors.
Keep in mind 4 years can be subjective since at Michigan you need 128 credits to graduate engineering. If you don’t bring in some credits or take summer courses I believe that is 4.5 years to finish. Some will do co-ops or internships during the year and can bring it to 5 years plus.
Michigan is not unique in requiring more than 120 credits or equivalent to complete a bachelor’s degree in engineering. 128 credits is not too bad for students who can get into a college of Michigan’s selectivity, since it means averaging 16 rather than 15 credits per semester to finish in 8 semesters of school (co-ops can extend calendar time, but do not inherently increase number of tuition-paying semesters).
However, students who want to bring in transfer credit from other colleges should carefully check its transfer credit database, since Michigan can be stingy with granting subject credit for transferred courses. This includes transfer students and frosh with college courses taken while in high school.
I am pretty sure my undergraduate degree had over 130 hours and I finished in 4.0 years with no summer classes.
128 hours means 16 hours per semester. That’s not bad at all. It’s honestly about average.
My daughter needed 131 credits for her engineering degree. She came in with no AP or DE credits but graduated in 4 years/8 semesters and no summers. It can be done and yes she took the 16-17 credits per semester.
I was a little surprised that her Bright Futures money ended at 120 credits.
Yes it can be done in 4 years but just had a mechanical engineering senior from UIC come in and this was his excuse for graduating a semester late. But he is also doing an internship at Embry - Riddle (if I have that correct) and is going into aerospace. Just putting it out there that for some it can be a possibility. My son is a semester ahead in industrial at Michigan, so I get it.
UIC is less selective, and has a relatively high percentage of students from lower income backgrounds (52% Pell grant) who presumably have to work to afford school (especially since Illinois is not very good with in-state financial aid). This makes it more likely that UIC students are less able to handle full or slightly over course loads and therefore need to take extra semesters, compared to Michigan students.
Well, I heard back from Michigan…they were nice enough to run a report for me, not for BME but for Engineering overall. In 2018, 92.6% of students who had entered as new freshmen in Engineering graduated from Michigan, and 86.5% graduated with an Engineering degree. In 2017, the numbers were 89.2% and 82.9%; in 2016, 89.8% and 81.2%. Pretty impressive.
I never received a response from Texas…