Oh yeah @khanam, can your highly ranked engineering programs 3D print something that simultaneously says their school’s name and “ENGIN”? https://www.facebook.com/brownengineering/videos (stupid filters, the asterisks are for that little pet project of some guy named Zuckerberg - super weird, after editing my post to mention the asterisks they disappeared)
Didn’t think so. B-)
@iwannabe_Brown I accept defeat! Lol, actually that was cool too.
True, big engineering schools have more faculty,teaching and research facilities, programs and courses, and students than smaller programs like Brown Engineering. The depth and breadth of engineering expertise available to students at places like UC Berkeley cannot be matched even by smaller engineering programs like Harvey Mudd or Olin. Yet, when it comes to undergraduate engineering education, some of the smaller schools have established a successful track record in producing graduates that possess engineering problem-solving skills and competencies that surpass those of their more traditionally-schooled peers.
If you visited Olin, talked to the faculty and students, and examined the school’s curriculum and its outcome, you would be impressed by what is taking place at this small school. Here is a link to an old document describing the school’s curriculum: http://www.olin.edu/sites/default/files/final_cdmb_report.pdf
After all is said and done, When it comes to (student) learning, the educational model being employed is more significant than the amount of resources being used.
Places like Brown could have a significant impact on advancing engineering education in ways that their traditional counterparts are not equipped to do.
This may be naive and oversimplified, and I am only talking about undergraduate engineering, but: ABET accreditation applies to big and small, Ivy and not schools, and doesn’t leave much room for non-engineering courses at Brown; and, you could have a million courses and a million professors, but each individual student can only take so many courses. The bigger issue, I have thought, is the quality and rigor of those courses that undergraduates take. I don’t know, qualitatively, how you assess different programs against each other, but I do think that those ranking systems that focus on the ‘macro’ of how many courses, how many labs, how many professors, how much money in grants, probably don’t, in the end, measure much about the quality of education an individual student gets. I am in no position to judge, but I hope Brown does a good job, as my ‘investment’ in the program is about to graduate. [Edit: I see that, really, this point in many ways echoes Emotive’s post, above, so should have acknowledged that]