Is harvard engineering (Biomedical especially) famous?

College Majors Engineering Majors
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<p>Sakky, </p>

<p>Well, poli sci is supposed to be a science, but I really wouldn't put it up there with any of the hard sciences. It's simply just starting to live up to its more quantitative namesake. I mean, until Riker and maybe Tsebelis and Cox really upped the quantitative ante, poli sci was not that scientific.</p>

<p>Even so, MITs poli sci is more than "quite decent," it's superb. It's easily top 10 in most everything poli sci related, and does a good job of placing candidates into high level professorships and non-academic jobs (just browsing, I saw a couple at Brookings, one at JHU, and one Goldman, Sachs.)</p>

<p>Whatever you want to say about Cal Tech, it produced two of the most important political scientists of this current generation: Cox and McCubbins. I've also continued to be fairly impressed with the quality of research of the department.</p>

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<p>UCLAri, I can agree with you that polisci especially at MIT but also at Caltech can be quite good. Yet while polisci may not exactly be a hard science, but I wouldn't exactly call it a humanities either. Therefore I stand by my statement that you will probably get a better engineering education at Harvard than a humanities education at MIT/Caltech. I don't think that's a controversial statement.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
Yeah, I've got some reservations about Mudd's all-in-one engineering degree, but seeing as how my brother's a Mudd engineering sophomore, I've been getting a running first-hand account on how well that's going to end up serving him. I'm interested, but I'm still skeptical. The jury's still out for me. Ask me again in another three years! =)

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<p>I'll provide both an analogy and a direct response. First, the analogy.</p>

<p>I don't think an all-in-one engineering degree is necessarily a bad thing. I would point to the example of Caltech. I think a lot of people know that Caltech is an elite engineering school. However, what a lot of people don't know is that Caltech has only 4 ABET-accredited engineering programs, compared to the 13 at MIT. Only 3 specific engineering disciplines at Caltech are accredited - electrical, mechanical, and chemical - and only in 2004 did mechanical engineering finally get accredited. </p>

<p>So what about all of Caltech's other engineering disciplines? What about Civil engineering? What about materials science? What about bioengineering? What about environmental engineering? What about Caltech's famed (because of JPL) aeronautical engineering program? Are these not accredited? Actually they are, under the catch-all category of "Engineering and Applied Science" (EAS).</p>

<p><a href="http://www.abet.org/schoolstateeac.asp%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.abet.org/schoolstateeac.asp&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Hence, what that basically means is that, at least from an accreditation standpoint, EAS at Caltech is basically a 'general' all-in-one Engineering degree, not very different from Mudd's general Engineering degree. </p>

<p>The Caltech commencement data bears this out. Except for the aforementioned Electrical, Chemical, and Mechanical Engineering disciplines, no undergrad at Caltech actually receives a formal BS in any specific engineering discipline. For example, it is impossible to get a formal Caltech BS degree in Civil Engineering. Or Materials Science. Or Aeronautics/Aeronautical Engineering. Or Environmental Engineering. Or Bioengineering. Instead, your formal BS is granted in "Engineering and Applied Science". </p>

<p>But don't take my word for it. Go look through the commencement data yourself and try to find somebody who has actually received a formal BS in Civil Engineering. Or Aeronautics/Aeronautical Engineering. Or Bioengineering. You can't do it. </p>

<p><a href="http://pr.caltech.edu/commencement/05/bs.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://pr.caltech.edu/commencement/05/bs.pdf&lt;/a>
<a href="http://pr.caltech.edu/commencement/04/bs.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://pr.caltech.edu/commencement/04/bs.pdf&lt;/a>
<a href="http://pr.caltech.edu/commencement/03/bs.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://pr.caltech.edu/commencement/03/bs.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>The point is, Caltech is basically running an all-in-one engineering program for many of its engineering disciplines. Yet Caltech doesn't seem too worse for wear for it. Caltech's Aeronautics/Aeronautical Engineering program (again, because of JPL), is arguably the best in the world, despite the fact that you can't earn a actual formal BS in Aeronautics/Aeronautical Engineering. </p>

<p>{Incidentally what that means is that Caltech's BioEngineering degree is accredited under the EAS rubric, but MIT's and Stanford's BioEngineering degrees are not accredited at all}. </p>

<p>I'll now defend Mudd directly. Consider their average salary.</p>

<p>"Average salary upon graduation in 2003 was $53,900"</p>

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

<p>Compare that to the engineering salaries in 2003 for Berkeley graduates. You can ignore all the humanities and science majors at Berkeley, and just look at the Berkeley engineers. Also keep in mind that the reported Mudd salary is a consolidated salary, and not everybody at Mudd is an engineer - you also got natural science and math majors, who tend to get paid less than engineers. Yet that consolidated Mudd salary figure is comparable to the salaries of just the engineers at Berkeley.</p>

<p><a href="http://career.berkeley.edu/CarDest/2003Majors.stm%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://career.berkeley.edu/CarDest/2003Majors.stm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Also, as far as graduate-school placement is concerned, consider this quote from Sowell:</p>

<p>"Everyone has heard of M.I.T. and Cal Tech, but most laymen would be surprised to learn that Harvey Mudd College has a higher percentage of its graduates go on to receive doctorates than either of these renowned institutions. Many would be surprised that Cooper Union comes next among engineering schools in this respect...</p>

<p>...a ranking of those colleges, universities, and technical institutes with the highest percentage of their graduates going on to receive doctorates in math, the physical sciences, and engineering can be one of these useful lists:</p>

<p>INSTITUTION %
1. Harvey Mudd College 34.4
2. California Institute of Technology 33.7
3. Massachusetts Institute of Technology 17.3
4. Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art 12.5 "</p>

<p><a href="http://www.leaderu.com/choosingcollege/sowell-choosing/chpter04.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.leaderu.com/choosingcollege/sowell-choosing/chpter04.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>The point I'm making is not that I think Mudd is better than all of the research universities. I don't know who's better. I'm simply saying that Mudd seems to be doing pretty well for itself. Employers are paying Mudd graduates quite well, relative to what they pay engineers from research universities. And Mudd seems to be highly successful in graduate-school placement. Hence, it seems to me that Mudd's general Engineering degree can't be THAT bad. If it was really that bad, then why are employers paying them the money that they do, and why are doctoral programs so willing to take them?</p>

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<em>Shakes hands with Sakky</em> Good show, old boy. Good show. We'll have to do this again sometime.... but not soon. =)

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<p>I never meant for this to get personal, and I still don't. I have respectfully disagreed with many people on CC. But fear not, I still value your opinion, even if I don't agree with it.</p>

<p>Nevertheless, I stand by what my statement, which is not that I think Harvard engineering is the equal of MIT (because obviously it is not), but because I think that Harvard engineering is still a top-flight engineering program when you consider that the vast majority of programs out there can only dream of being as good as Harvard's. </p>

<p>And furthermore, I would emphasize the safety of taking a Harvard admission offer, because of the unfortunate realities that a lot of people who think they want to study engineering never actually will complete an engineering degree, and because even of those that do, many will choose non-engineering careers. So, again, let's say you choose Duke over Harvard because you want to be an engineer. What if you find out, like many do, that you don't want to major in engineering anymore? Or what if you do complete that Duke engineering degree and then find out you'd rather pursue a non-engineering career path, like consulting or banking? It happens to a lot of people. The point is, you have to acknowledge this strong possibility when you are choosing schools. In fact, given the data, I would argue that it's not just possible, it's actually probable. Like I said, at least half of all prospective engineering students will end up switching out of the engineering major, and that doesn't even count those people who do complete the major and then leave the field.</p>

<p>Now, I think we could have a VERY interesting conversation about why is it that people leave. For example, why do so many prospective engineering students switch out, and is there anything we can or should do about it? Why do so many people who earn engineering degrees take non-engineering jobs, and can/should we do anything about that? That would be an extremely interesting conversation in and of itself. </p>

<p>After all, if a higher percentage of people who thought they wanted to study engineering as freshman actually ultimately do become working engineers, then that would be less reason to choose Harvard. However, right or wrong, we don't live in that world. We live in a world where a lot of prospective engineers switch out, and we need to be cognizant of this fact. We can talk about why it is true, but we have to acknowledge that it is true.</p>

<p>Look, for my own personal reasons, I don't like the fact that so many people switch out of engineering. Believe me, it's not fun for me to say it. But it is the truth, and I would be committing quite a disservice if I pretended that it isn't the truth.</p>

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<p>"Now, I think we could have a VERY interesting conversation about why is it that people leave. "</p>

<p>Another conversation I would like to hear more about is this: given that so many people do leave, how can engineering education at the college level be structured to serve such people better? In fact, how can engineering education be structured to serve the needs of people who, right off the start, don't intend to become professional engineers at all? After all, why shouldn't engineering be a popular major for pre-meds and pre-laws? It does provide excellent training for analytical and problem-solving skills. The grading curve is one issue; does engineering grading have to be the way it is?</p>

<p>From this point of view, a Harvard all-in-one non-ABET certified AB degree is actually an interesting possibility.</p>

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<p>Okay, now we're starting a different thread, more or less, so I'm allowed to talk again, right? ;)</p>

<p>This is actually the conversation I'm currently having with my brother, the sophomore at Mudd, right now over IM:</p>

<p>Me: I think Mudd's probably riding the crest of the wave in terms of where engineering education needs to go in order to fit everything in, but I'm still skeptical as to how it'll fit in to the established program. I'm sure it'll be fine, but you're my guinea pig before I start backing it with my full weight. But there was a LOT of wasted time with my more traditional engineering program. Things were covered two or three times in different classes, and there was a LOT of overlap, and some things weren't covered at all... Sort of smacked of academic administrative laziness.</p>

<p>Him: yeah, I have the same sorts of concerns. I mean, I look at my friends who are already knee-deep into whatever they're gonna do for the rest of their lives. but, at the same time, I'm reassured by the LINES of people who come wanting to hire us.</p>

<p>Me: Part of it is certainly that Mudd accepts only the best, and y'all are very capable of learning, but it's also more than that, and I'm interested to see what exactly it is that you guys walk away from Mudd with.</p>

<p>Him: yeah. I mean, I'm pretty confident that they know what they're doing. it seems like "OMG, I won't actually know ANYTHING in depth enough to be able to do it", but SO MUCH of what they're teaching is SO transferable to other fields, it seems that the details could be taught pretty easily once you have the really broad background. hopefully. it's just a might bit unnerving to see somebody like Alex doing Verilog work, which is directly what he's gonna do as a EE in practice, and I haven't done anything but theory yet.</p>

<p>Me: I think you're right. Having come from a more traditional engineering educational background, I think about the things like hydrology and steel design courses, and concrete design, and things like that, and I get a little bit concerned that there are so many things that <em>I</em> know as a civ that I would want to have in my pocket when I left with my undergraduate degree, but then, most of that sort of things is pretty procedural... I have hesitations that y'all won't get that sort of thing, but you're also not to that point in your education yet. It seems like you guys are starting with the theory and plowing through <em>it</em> before you get to the practical parts of engineering, whereas people like Alex and I had an odd hybridized mix of both theory and practice thrown into our educational food processors during all four years.</p>

<p>Him: Well, the practical part is why clinic at Mudd is three semesters long... And that's probably quite true. I mean, at the end of the day, Verilog is just another programming languages. Mudd made sure I knew four of them, in four different programming paradigms. the fifth is really easy to learn. The things I don't know about Java I can learn from a book. and if I learned them now, they won't really be applicable in 10 years.</p>

<p>Me: I think it'll all work out okay. I'm definitely intrigued.</p>

<p>Him: it's interesting to see the kinds of people who went here. very few of them did something REALLY HUGE that everyone knows about, but there are an awful lot of people (out of 4500 alums, remember) who've done something important in their fields. The guy who wrote Flash... the guy who made the Remote Procedure Call... the guy who invented SQL.</p>

<p>Me: Good track record.</p>

<p>Him: Yeah. I think it'll be fine. it's just unnerving being the guinea pig. Well, not so much guinea pig as just the guy doing something that's DIFFERENT.</p>

<p>Me: Right. Different's not bad, though. The basis of it is, engineering education's at a crossroads, and different needs to happen.</p>

<p>Him: yeah. and I'm pretty sure this is the right different. I mean, I think if I were designing anything that could move, be it in signals or physical motion, knowing how signals add and transform and moving from different spaces and such would be really important. and Mudd agrees, because it teaches everyone from physicists to biologists the Fourier transform.</p>

<p>Me: I think it'll all work out extraordinarily well. I'm just reserving final judgment until I know more closely how the practical side of things comes into play for you. The way I see it, Mudd offers a much more fluid engineering education, which is where I think it needs to go. The only problem is that there's so much bureaucracy involved in turning the tides of an entire field so steeped in tradition that it still uses the unit "kips"...</p>

<p>Him: Very true. And Mudd's small enough that it can change.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
it's interesting to see the kinds of people who went here. very few of them did something REALLY HUGE that everyone knows about, but there are an awful lot of people (out of 4500 alums, remember) who've done something important in their fields. The guy who wrote Flash... the guy who made the Remote Procedure Call... the guy who invented SQL.

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<p>I would point out that Mudd is a very small school. You're not going to produce a huge absolute number of luminary graduates if you don't have a lot of people in the first place. Secondly, Mudd obviously has no graduate school. A lot of the 'greatness' of the big brand-name tech schools like MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and Caltech comes from the accomplishments of the graduate students rather than the undergrads. In any case, consider the fact that MIT has about 10,000 students (grad + undergrad), which is literally more than 12 times the number of students that Mudd has. True, not all of MIT's students are technical (there are some humanities people, some poli-sci people there is the Media Lab, and of course there is the MIT Sloan School of Management), but the point is, sheer size would dictate that MIT will have more tech luminaires than Mudd does.</p>

<p>I would also point out that Mudd was founded only in 1955, so it simply hasn't had the time to create a long list of luminaries the way that much older schools like MIT (founded 1865), Illinois (1867), Berkeley (1868), Caltech, or Stanford (both 1891) had. Obviously you can create more luminaries if you've simply been around longer.</p>

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<p>Sorry if I came across as harsh with my comment about "lesser" engineering schools. </p>

<p>My point is that the most fair comparison (think the control in an experiment) is not San Jose State, but schools of a similar rigour and difficulty to Harvard that have specialty engineering - like Stanford or MIT or Caltech. Let's at least make a reasonably good comparison here. :)</p>

<p>Sakky - I do agree that not all people who go into engineering programmes want to be engineers. [Looks around... moi?] If you want engineering as a way to improve your quantitative skills so you can go to Goldman Sachs, then H would be fabulous. </p>

<p>For me, the issue is the person who wants to be an engineer - really, deep down wants to be an engineer. In that situation, there are a lot of better options than Harvard (yes, worse ones, too), but there are many better options available with someone who has the talent to get into Harvard. </p>

<p>My alma mater had separate requirements for engineers (those in the School of Engin.) - four semesters of math, lots of chem and physics, engineering intro courses, computer programming, etc - in addition to the normal engineering courses. </p>

<p><a href="http://www.registrar.fas.harvard.edu/handbooks/student/PDF/Chapter%203/engineering_sciences.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.registrar.fas.harvard.edu/handbooks/student/PDF/Chapter%203/engineering_sciences.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>has the list of required courses for a Harvard engineering degree. It seems to lack some of the breadth and depth of a traditional engineering curriculum - although y'all are free to comment. </p>

<p>I'm coming from my own perspective - as someone who did a traditional engineering school in a basic engineering discipline (none of this "biophysical chemistry with a dash of environmental science" stuff) and then worked as an engineer, in an engineering firm. If that's your route, then why Harvard when you have enough talent to get into someplace else? The H website is pretty explicit about it being a good route to other disciplines or graduate study - but not the very traditional route of getting a bachelor's and working. </p>

<p>~Aries, opinionated as always</p>

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<p>
[quote]
For me, the issue is the person who wants to be an engineer - really, deep down wants to be an engineer. In that situation, there are a lot of better options than Harvard (yes, worse ones, too), but there are many better options available with someone who has the talent to get into Harvard.

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<p>For me, this is really a non-issue, for the simple reason that such a person would never have gotten into Harvard simply because he/she would never have applied in the first place, and hence choosing between Harvard and Stanford/MIT/Caltech/etc. is therefore a false choice. Why would you waste your time and money applying to Harvard is you are absolutely 100% sure you want to be an engineer? The fact that you got into Harvard means that you must have applied, which therefore means that you weren't 100% sure you wanted to be an engineer in the first place. </p>

<p>It is precisely these "unsures" that need to understand just how many people who think they want to be engineers end up not being engineers. </p>

<p>
[quote]

My alma mater had separate requirements for engineers (those in the School of Engin.) - four semesters of math, lots of chem and physics, engineering intro courses, computer programming, etc - in addition to the normal engineering courses. </p>

<p><a href="http://www.registrar.fas.harvard.ed...ng_sciences.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.registrar.fas.harvard.ed...ng_sciences.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>has the list of required courses for a Harvard engineering degree. It seems to lack some of the breadth and depth of a traditional engineering curriculum - although y'all are free to comment. </p>

<p>I'm coming from my own perspective - as someone who did a traditional engineering school in a basic engineering discipline (none of this "biophysical chemistry with a dash of environmental science" stuff) and then worked as an engineer, in an engineering firm. If that's your route, then why Harvard when you have enough talent to get into someplace else? The H website is pretty explicit about it being a good route to other disciplines or graduate study - but not the very traditional route of getting a bachelor's and working

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<p>Not to sound like a broken record, but again I would invoke the example of the humanities students at MIT and Caltech. I would argue that engineers at Harvard are no worse off than Literature majors at the 2 Institutes. </p>

<p>Furthermore, the real question comes down to safety - what are you going to do if you switch out of engineering, as most people seem to do according to the data? </p>

<p>The real issue to me is not whether Harvard engineering is as good as that at MIT or Caltech, because obviously it is not, but rather why is it that so many people who think they want to be engineers don't actually become engineers. Given those realities on the ground, you need to respect the possibility (indeed the probability) that this will happen to you.</p>

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<p>My $0.02 on the topic, coming from MIT, is that it makes me sad to see people come to MIT undecided on a major, then figure out a year or two in that they don't like science, engineering, or even management. It doesn't happen as often as one might think, but it's unfortunate to watch.</p>

<p>The stereotypical sequence is that a freshman comes in thinking he/she is going to be EECS, gets weeded out in the intro course, goes to biology, either gets weeded or hates it, then ends up in management. Some people even bounce one step further down the MIT ladder (please note heavy irony) and become humanities majors. </p>

<p>There are definitely people who are sure about what they want to do when they get to college (my career plan has been the same since freshman year of high school), but I agree with sakky that those who aren't sure (or reasonably sure) are better off at a more well-rounded school.</p>

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<p>
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figure out a year or two in that they don't like science, engineering, or even management

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<p>"Even" management, huh?</p>

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The stereotypical sequence is that a freshman comes in thinking he/she is going to be EECS, gets weeded out in the intro course, goes to biology, either gets weeded or hates it, then ends up in management

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</p>

<p>Man, it's getting rough here. Sloan is supposed to be the #2 undergraduate business school in the country. You could do a WHOLE lot worse than getting your undergrad management degree at Sloan. </p>

<p>Yet I do have to agree that Sloan is often times stereotypically viewed (unfortunately with some justification) as a dumping ground for those MIT students who can't hack engineering or science.</p>

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<p>Haha, I wasn't trying to hate on Sloan. After all, both of my majors (biology and particularly brain and cognitive sciences) are seen as majors for people who can't hack it.</p>

<p>What I meant by the "don't like science, engineering, or even management" was more "they don't like anything the school has to offer" -- nothing was implied in the ordering. :)</p>

<p>But yes, there's some serious snobbery among nerds. It's lame, but there it is.</p>

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<p>
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Not to sound like a broken record, but again I would invoke the example of the humanities students at MIT and Caltech. I would argue that engineers at Harvard are no worse off than Literature majors at the 2 Institutes.

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<p>There're some subtle points to note however; First, the number of Caltech students majoring in humanities other than economics may have an average of zero annually, in contrast to a small but consistent number of engineering students at Harvard or literature students at MIT. Secondly, which you may disagree, is that the difference in perception on between the literature students at MIT/Caltech and engineering students at Harvard. Generally, Caltech's humanities (exc. Economics) grads (if any) would be perceived as those who are unable to hack its science/engineering courses while Harvard engineering students may be perceived as those who are not good enough for the top engineering schools but craving for prestige. Let's face it, many MIT/Caltech students who end up in humanities are the 'burned-out' students where the Harvard students ending up in engineering are not at all. In this case the attitude of those students are arguably very different. Those Harvard students who really end-up with engineering have the choice to transfer to a school with better enginerring program (e.g. Cornell), it's not as if they are forced to end up with engineering degree at Harvard. This is very different from the humanities students case at MIT/Caltech. Many of them are forced (perhaps out of frustation) to end up with humanities degree (although arguably a small number of students want to study humanities at MIT just because for the name). This why I'd say that the Harvard engineering students may probably be laughed at in the engineering circle, eventhough they're certainly quite good. I don't think your comparison between the humanities students at MIT/Caltech and the engineering students at Harvard is very just.</p>

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<p>Harvard is one of the top five schools in engineering, when measured by research QUALITY (see ranking below). Ignore the surveys like USNews, which are biased towards very large programs with high numbers of professors. The smaller schools - like Caltech, Yale and Harvard - have the best engineering programs on a per-student basis.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.sciencewatch.com/nov-dec2002/sw_nov-dec2002_page2.htm#Engineering%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.sciencewatch.com/nov-dec2002/sw_nov-dec2002_page2.htm#Engineering&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>"Harvard engineering students may probably be laughed at in the engineering circle"</p>

<p>rtkysg -- would you say that this is also true of GRADUATE engineering students at Harvard, or even more true, or less true?</p>

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<p>
[quote]
Harvard is one of the top five schools in engineering, when measured by research QUALITY (see ranking below). Ignore the surveys like USNews, which are biased towards very large programs with high numbers of professors. The smaller schools - like Caltech, Yale and Harvard - have the best engineering programs on a per-student basis.

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</p>

<p>Sorry, I don't buy that ranking in the link you gave either. If you want to measure the quality which is more or less agreed by people in academia, I would suggest you refer to NRC ranking. Best engineering program on per-student basis doesn't give a good indicator when the faculty and its students are awfully of a small size.</p>

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<p>4thfloor,</p>

<p>It is even more true for the GRADUATE school. There may be an excuse for the undetermined undergrad students who are not sure if they're into engineering totally. But Harvard engineering dept. is basically weak, and grad students in engineering would know this for sure.</p>

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<p>Thanks, rtkysg. Makes good sense to me. What I don't understand, in that case, is why (source: US News ranking table) Harvard Grad Engineering shows one of the lowest acceptance rates and one of the highest student GRE scores. For other professional schools -- Law, Business, less so Medicine -- the correlations between ranking, standardized test scores, and acceptance rate are much stronger.</p>

<p>Not looking for an argument here; just looking for explanation.</p>

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<p>
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What I don't understand, in that case, is why (source: US News ranking table) Harvard Grad Engineering shows one of the lowest acceptance rates and one of the highest student GRE scores.

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<p>I don't think it's hard to explain. The volume of grad students is huge, and a small percentage of those who dyingly want to get to Harvard, just for the sake of its name, would be enough to flood Harvard engineering dept, and these students are not necessarily weak academically. I don't think it's hard to find good engineering students at, let's say Michigan State who would prefer Harvard engineering to Michigan (Ann-Arbor) engineering for graduate study. Coupled with the fact that Harvard engineering could only accomodate a small number of students, it's not hard to get students with quite good profiles, esp. in GRE score.</p>

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<p>
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First, the number of Caltech students majoring in humanities other than economics may have an average of zero annually, in contrast to a small but consistent number of engineering students at Harvard or literature students at MIT.

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</p>

<p>If you look at the commencement data for Caltech, you will see that generally an average of about 2-3 people graduate with Literature degrees each year, although granted, most of them do it as part of a double-major.</p>

<p><a href="http://pr.caltech.edu/commencement/04/bs.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://pr.caltech.edu/commencement/04/bs.pdf&lt;/a>
<a href="http://pr.caltech.edu/commencement/03/bs.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://pr.caltech.edu/commencement/03/bs.html&lt;/a>
<a href="http://pr.caltech.edu/commencement/02/bs.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://pr.caltech.edu/commencement/02/bs.html&lt;/a>
<a href="http://pr.caltech.edu/commencement/01/bs.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://pr.caltech.edu/commencement/01/bs.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>As a point of comparison, Caltech is arguably the best school in the world for Geophysics, yet only about 2-3 people graduate with Geophysics BS degrees every year. </p>

<p>I don't know what the numerical data is regarding the percentage of MIT humanities students who are actually getting double-degrees (with the other degree being something technical), but I would suspect that it is rather high. Maybe molliebatmit could comment on this.</p>

<p>Similarly, I would strongly suspect that some of the Harvard engineering students are actually double-majors (or "dual-concentrators" in Harvard parlance), linked with a natural science or with math. And I certainly don't see anything particularly wrong with that. </p>

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[quote]
In this case the attitude of those students are arguably very different. Those Harvard students who really end-up with engineering have the choice to transfer to a school with better enginerring program (e.g. Cornell), it's not as if they are forced to end up with engineering degree at Harvard. This is very different from the humanities students case at MIT/Caltech. Many of them are forced (perhaps out of frustation) to end up with humanities degree (although arguably a small number of students want to study humanities at MIT just because for the name).

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<p>I would strongly disagree with this, particularly because I would assert that, just like you assert that somebody who's good enough to get into Harvard can transfer into Cornell for engineering, I would similarly assert that anybody who's good enough to get into MIT or Caltech is probably good enough to transfer into at least a half-decent school that has a better humanities program than the Institutes do. After all, there are PLENTY of schools out there that aren't that hard to get into that offer stronger humanities programs than than the Institutes do. Hence, just like you say that the Harvard guys stick around for the name, I would surmise that the same thing happens with the MIT/Caltech guys. Nobody is forcing those Tech'ers to stay. So to me, it's the same thing, and hence my comparison is perfectly just. </p>

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why I'd say that the Harvard engineering students may probably be laughed at in the engineering circle, eventhough they're certainly quite good.

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<p>Let me give you an example. Let's say a guy wants to do BioE/BioMedE. He gets into Caltech and Johns Hopkins. He chooses Caltech. Are we going to laugh at him? Probably not, right? But why not? Johns Hopkins has arguably the best bioE program in the country, and Caltech's, while good, is clearly not as good. So maybe you could say that this guy doesn't really care about getting the best BioE degree he can, but is just interested in getting the Caltech brand-name under his belt. After all, except for bio-stuff, the general Caltech brand-name is probably better than the general Hopkins brand name. So then it would follow that this guy ought to be laughed at within the BioEngineering circle, right? </p>

<p>I would say probably not, or at least not to the same amount as you are saying about the Harvard engineer. </p>

<p>Hence, I think the REAL issue at hand is not about somebody getting laughed at for choosing a worse program for a better one. It's really about the Harvard brand-name specifically, isn't it? THAT'S what gets your goat, isn't it? It seems to me that what the REAL issue on the table is that there is a certain resentment of Harvard's prestige such that people may choose to go to Harvard just because it's Harvard even if that means a possible loss of quality in the specific curricula in question. Is that the real problem?</p>

<p>And the first thing I would say to that is that this happens at all the famous schools. All of them have students who are there just for the brand-name. For example, MIT and Caltech have plenty of students who may actually be better off at someplace like Harvey Mudd, but are there because they want the big brand name. Lots of students in California apply to many of the UC's and then mechanistically choose to attend the most prestigious one they can get into, and hence Berkeley and UCLA have plenty of students who are there just for the name. The point is, EVERY famous school uses its prestige to bring in students. They all play the prestige card. Tt's just that Harvard can play it better than the other schools can. So if Harvard is guilty of anything, it's only guilty of doing it better than the other schools do it. The other schools certainly don't have clean hands. </p>

<p>Secondly, so what if people are chasing prestige? What's wrong with that? Let's face it. We live in a world where prestige matters. Right or wrong, that's the world we live in. For example, talking about employment, I've heard plenty of people say that they would ultimately like to work for a small company but they are afraid that that might hurt their future employment prospects, so for the time being, they're going to work for a big brand-name company like General Electric or Microsoft or ExxonMobil, just so that they can have it on their resume. Implicit in that logic is the understanding that having a big brand-name company on your resume can be a boon to your future career. Similarly, having a big brand-name college on your resume can also be a boon. It doesn't guarantee anything, but it can be a boon. Fair or not fair, that's how the game is played.</p>

<p>Perhaps the most immediately applicable example I know is this. I know a guy who's getting his MBA right now who just got an offer from Goldman Sachs to be an investment banker. He's already said that he knows he doesn't really like the investment banking lifestyle. But he's going to take the job anyway, at least for a couple of years, even though he knows he's not going to like it. Why? Because he knows that having the name Goldman Sachs on his resume is a very good thing to have. He knows that having that on the resume will help him get to where he ultimately wants to go. Perhaps even more importantly, he knows that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: if he turns the offer down, he knows it will never come back. It's not like you can simply decide one fine day that you want to become an investment banker. IBanking offers only come around every at certain times in your life, like after you finish your MBA. If you get it and turn it down, it's not coming back.</p>

<p>What I suspect the real issue at hand here is simple jealousy. While I don't want to overgeneralize, I strongly suspect that what is happening is that a lot of those engineers who are supposedly laughing at the Harvard engineers secretly wished they were the ones who had gotten into Harvard. Honestly, I think a lot of engineering students at, say, Illinois, Purdue, Texas or Georgia Tech, or any of these other bigname engineering schools would have eagerly gone to Harvard (even if it meant going getting a slightly worse engineering degree) except that they didn't get in. So now they resent those guys who did get into Harvard and so they try to find some way to make themselves feel better by dissing the Harvard engineering program (when again, they would have happily gone there themselves if they had gotten the offer). Not all of them are like that, but I suspect that that has a lot to do with it. After all, nobody goes around dissing and jeering the Caltech bioengineers. So I can surmise that the reason why the Harvard engineers get jeered is because of jealousy.</p>

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But Harvard engineering dept. is basically weak, and grad students in engineering would know this for sure

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<p>Oh come on, that's even MORE egregious. If anything, the Harvard graduate engineering program is actually BETTER than the undergraduate engineering program.</p>

<p>Look, again, why would the Harvard graduate engineering students get laughed at? Why? Do we go around laughing and jeering at the graduate engineering students at UCRiverside? Or Michigan Tech? Or Wayne State? Harvard grad engineering is clearly better than ALL of them.</p>

<p>Look, again, Harvard grad engineering is clearly not as good as MIT grad engineering. But so what? Just because a program is not as good, it means it ought to be jeered. Again, I know a guy who is a Harvard engineering grad-student. He spends a LOT of time cross-regging at MIT. I asked him why he didn't just go to MIT, if he's going to spend so much time there anyway. His answer was simple and frank - he didn't get into MIT for grad-school. Or Stanford, or Berkeley, or any of the other superelite grad eng programs. </p>

<p>This is not a stupid guy - his undergrad was at Caltech. But when it came time to go to grad-school, Harvard was the best school he could get into. Sure, he would have preferred MIT or Stanford. But he didn't get in. So what do you want hiim to do? Should he just give up? Or shoot himself? Look, he's doing the best he can with the options that are available to him. Why do you want to jeer a guy like that? Not everybody gets to go to the absolute best graduate program in their field. In fact, most people don't. Often times, Harvard grad eng is the best you can do. </p>

<p>And of course there are plenty of grad eng students who end up in much much worse grad programs than Harvard, and yet nobody's laughing at them.</p>