what it says in the title basically. I understand ABET is absolutely vital for Civil Engineers, but how important is it in the field of electrical engineering?
If I, for the sake of argument, attend a school without an accredited program (e.g. Stanford), will my career choices be restricted in any way? I heard ABET is important for PE licensing; how important/prevalent is PE licensing in electrical engineering?
I also heard that some gov’t jobs and grad schools require ABET accredited degrees. Is this true?
In general, PE licensing (and therefore ABET accreditation) is important if you work on infrastructure. For EEs, this means the power grid. If you want to become a power systems engineer and tinker with the grid, you should probably look for an ABET EE degree. In practice, this is not usually an issue, because the vast majority of legitimate EE degrees do have ABET. Stanford is a notable exception, but I doubt there are many others.
If you just want to design transportable appliances that plug into the grid (or run off batteries), then you will probably never need a PE license. Most EEs fall into this category, and are unlicensed.
Finally, note that most states (not all) have alternative routes to PE licensure for non-ABET engineering degrees. You can usually (not always) compensate for a non-ABET engineering degree with additional work experience. The rules are highly inconsistent, so if you are concerned about a specific state, you should look up the regs at your state engineering board.
Do they really screen the degrees of each applicant to ensure that they have the ABET seal of approval? Probably not. The primary goal here is probably to keep out applicants with questionable credentials, not people who went to Stanford. But it’s impossible to know for sure.
@eyemgh It is my understanding that they no longer wanted to be restricted by ABET’s requirements for technical courses. They say that they do not want to become a “technical institution” as they give students more freedom and choice to take courses in other areas (leadership, liberal arts, etc).
They lost their accreditation for EE in 2013. When I found out about this I was surprised as well.
ABET is a self licking ice cream cone that was a good idea but is now has unfortunately devolved into a pay to play bureaucracy. More top schools are just punting on ABET because they can. The only people still interested in the ABET accreditation is…wait for it…the government. I know, I used to work in it. Still the government is a very large employer so if you want to work for the government then you should go to an ABET accredited program.
I can’t see going to Stanford hurting your career. If you go to a school that the hiring manager hasn’t heard of, then ABET accreditation lets him or her know your program meets at least minimal quality standards.
I imagine that Stanford is confident that their brand name is enough to outweigh any lack of ABET accreditation in fields where it doesn’t matter. In most EE fields, it doesn’t matter. Power engineering has been discussed as one where it does, but that’s an old, non-sexy, non-cutting-edge field within EE that doesn’t attract a lot of students and isn’t likely something Stanford therefore feels much need to support. So they probably just kind of ignore it and focus on the sorts of things Silicon Valley likes and keep happily sending their students there to make a killing where ABET is irrelevant compared to actual skills.
There is certainly a danger of that, particularly at a school like Stanford that can, at times, be very high on itself. ABET’s requirements do tend to skew a lot toward a more vocational education compared to some of these extremely theory-heavy type schools (though certainly not to the point of being an engineering technology degree). For example, requirements for labs seem to have departments trying to shoehorn additional labs into courses, even when they don’t really make sense.
ABET still has some use, but it is primarily as a means of forcing all programs to meet some basic minimum standards. For small programs, it’s still valuable because their name brand/reputation can’t always carry them or their students into the job market, so having that ABET accreditation proves to the outside world that they got a solid education (or at least that their program was capable of providing one). For schools with more established reputations, it’s largely just a waste of time and money to go through the accreditation process. My department, which I suppose falls somewhere somewhere in the middle of the spectrum (but closer to the Stanford end), just went through it and we spent the whole stinking semester in faculty meetings fixing was mostly amounted to trivial nonsense as opposed to focusing on change our department could actually use.
Comparing the EE degree requirements for 2012 (last year with ABET accreditation) and 2013 (first year without) indicates that the main difference was a reduction in the number of engineering credits required. The old minimum was just above the ABET minimum of 3/8 of the total, while the new minimum is just below.
@unlimitedrequiem It is my understanding that several top schools have some non ABET engineering majors, although they may not be in EE: Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Penn, to name a few. Perhaps the program is too new, or they just don’t want to be restricted. In any case, I don’t think that at schools like that anyone is very concerned about it. Those students work their butts off like nothing I have ever seen, and the placement is excellent.
However, if a school is not a top 30 40 school, I think not having an ABET accreditation is likely to be a problem.
From what I learned here, it seems that for top schools (that employers and grad schools are familiar with), with-or-without ABET accreditation shouldn’t be a big problem. However, for jobs in the gov’t or with gov’t contractors, not having a degree from an ABET-accredited curriculum/institution may be a hurdle.
In addition, EE jobs related to civil engineering (power grid, etc) that often require PE licencing may be harder to get without ABET (requires more years of experience before eligible). However, for the vast majority of EE’s who work in networking, computer industry, etc, this shouldn’t be a problem.
I hope my new understanding is accurate.
@Much2learn I know that some schools like Penn offer different degree programs for depending on student goals. Penn Engineering offers degrees both in BAS (non ABET) and BSE (ABET). On their website it states that BSE is a professional degree, while BAS is for those who wish to enter a non-engineering field in the future (finance, business, med, law, etc.), but still wish to have a relatively technical background. I believe a similar set-up is present at schools like CMU and MIT, among others.
But since EE is a traditional engineering field, it is interesting that Stanford, the giant in silicon valley, decided to forgo ABET altogether and not offer 2 different degrees as so many other colleges have done.
Brown and Dartmouth would be the other examples of schools where an engineering major offers a non-ABET option (for those who want an engineering background but want to go into traditional Ivy League graduate jobs like finance or consulting) and a ABET option (for those who want to work in engineering). It does not look like CMU and MIT have such options.
Some newer or interdisciplinary engineering majors (e.g. biomedical engineering) appear to be less likely to be ABET accredited, particularly at high-reputation-for-engineering schools. Computer science is commonly not ABET accredited, though program quality can vary considerably.