<p>which ivy league provides the best engineering curiculum for undregraduates?</p>
<p>Cornell and Princeton</p>
<p>but none-ivy schools top the engineering chart (Mit, caltech, stanford, Michigan, Illinois, Georgia tech...........</p>
<p>Although it's a bit of an imprecise measure for engineering (most engineers get a Masters degree), I posted the top 50 undergrad schools in per capita production of future Engineering PhDs here:</p>
<p>Many of the large public universities don't make these lists because such a miniscule percentage of their undergrads go on to PhD programs -- not unlike the miniscule percentage of students from even a very good large public high school go on to super-elite colleges. So, the smaller, private colleges tend to dominate these lists, simply because they have distilled student bodies.</p>
<p>Five of the schools in the Ivy League Athletic Conference made the top-50 list: Princeton (13), Cornell (16), Penn (35), Brown (36), and Dartmouth (50).</p>
<p>Columbia (53), Yale (57), and Harvard (64) round out the list.</p>
<p>This "ranking" would suggest that schools such as Worcester Polytech, Brooklyn Polytech, Michigan Tech, Illinois Institiure of Tech, Florida Institute of Tech, And Stevens Institute of Tech are as prolific, or more prolific, sources for generation of future engineering PhDs than schools such as Stanford, Michigan, Duke and Berkeley.</p>
<p>The common word in these school names is "tech". They are engineering schools, so relatively few of their graduates pursue anything other than engineering. These schools are being ranked on the same list with universities where the engineering college is just one of a number of separate undergraduate colleges. Probably not the largest one either.</p>
<p>If the denominators in this ranking reflect the population of the colleges of engineering alone, for universities that have more than one college, then this is indeed an interesting and possibly insightful finding.</p>
<p>On the other hand, if the denominators reflect the entire student polulations of these universities, then IMO this provides a misleading view of the relative caliber of these institutions in engineering. The fact that most undergraduates at Stanford are studying something other than engineering in no way makes it a less attractive place than Worcester Polytechnic Institute to pursue engineering studies with the hope of eventually pursuing an engineering PhD.</p>
<p>A "ranking" of this sort, is highly influenced by a school's homogeneity,as opposed to the caliber of its programs or students in the field being considered. These engineering "rankings" with so many widely-considered non-top but pure tech schools showing up near the top, make this point quite evident.</p>
<p>It's not a ranking, nor any kind of qualitative measure. It is what it is: a list of per capita PhD production in engineering. Obviously, schools with more engineering students are going to produce more PhDs in engineering, schools with more economics students are going to produce more economics PhDs, and so and so forth. Of course, the tech schools are going to produce the most engineers. I mean, that seems self-evident! </p>
<p>However, this not an iron-clad correlation. There are schools on the list with very small engineering departments. The fact that most of the schools in the Ivy League football conference, are on the list, despite not having a heavy engineering focus, is a testament to their academic quality.</p>
<p>Since the poster only asked about schools with teams in a particular football conference, the list may be informative. For example, it would seem likely that there is greater emphasis on engineering at Princeton than at Harvard.</p>
<p>Cornell University's Engineering Department is well-known and well-respected. I think Princeton's would come in at 2nd, followed by Columbia University.</p>
<p>Penn SEAS isn't that bad, it's just that it's unique in its small size and liberal arts offering as well(you aren't restricted to just engineering classes).</p>
<p>"It's not a ranking."</p>
<p>My mistake.I was confused since it was described as "top 50.. (whatever)". and then the schools were listed in order .</p>
<p>I believe there are people whose first reaction after looking at this [ordered table? I'm struggling not to use the "r" word] would be, eg, maybe Stanford isn't as great in engineering as they thought, and maybe WPI is much better than they thought. I think those are misleading conclusions to draw, so I wanted to point that out, and explain why.</p>
<p>"Obviously, schools with more engineering students are going to produce more PhDs in engineering.."</p>
<p>That's not the point, actually. The point is that schools with a higher PERCENTAGE of students studying engineering will appear higher on a list like this than other schools who may have the same student & education quality, and the same number of engineering students or even more, and actually have MORE undergrads who receive PhDs in engineering, but simply also have a lot of other non-engineering students attending as well, usually in other colleges at the same university. Higher PERCENTAGE students studying one subject tends to bias towards higher PERCENTAGE future PhDs. The bias is in the percentage figure, not the total number of future PhDs or the number of engineering students.</p>
<p>Penn SEAS is really similar to Columbia SEAS, both put lots of emphasis on liberal arts and stuff. I think thats cool. Still, I think it hurts them in the rankings, because straight-up engineering schools like Cornell are ranked higher since they are just about the engineering, none of that humanities/core stuff.</p>
<p>
[quote]
The point is that schools with a higher PERCENTAGE of students studying engineering will appear higher on a list like this...
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Of course. Isn't that self-evident? </p>
<p>I certainly would expect the tech schools, with the highest percentage of engineering students, to produce the highest percentage of Engineers, regardless of whether we are talking Masters or PhDs. And, indeed, that is what we generally see.</p>
<p>The thing that jumps out on these lists are schools that aren't known as engineering schools and still produce a very high rate of engineering PhDs.</p>
<p>I also think that these lists can be very helpful in identifying some less selective schools that offer a serious academic experience. I mean, it doesn't take an aerospace engineer to identify the schools in the Ivy League football conference as being excellent schools for just about any field of study. But, it may be really valuable for other students to see a Rochester or a Lehigh or a Lafayette or an Alfred or Tulsa pop up on this list. Or, for example, the list could be the tip-off that Rice has a very high percentage of engineering undergrads (nearly 25%).</p>
<p>By the way, I agree that your way would be very informative. It is too much work to get the current engineering enrollment for hundreds and hundreds of schools. However, just for kicks, I did a small sample of ten schools. I found the total undergrad engineering enrollment figure for each school. Then, I divided the total engineering PhDs for the ten-year period as used in the other list, and multiplied by 100. This yields the number of engineering PhDs over a ten-year period for each 100 current engineering undergrads at the school.</p>
<p>Here are the results of the small sample:</p>
<p>Swarthmore College 41
Stanford University 32
Princeton University 28
Harvard University 24
Rice University 20
Duke University 19
Cornell University 18
Dartmouth College 10
Columbia University 7</p>
<p>Swarthmore and Stanford and Harvard move up because they have relatively small engineering enrollments as a percentage of their total enrollment, but produce a lot of PhDs (as they do in just about every field). Princeton and Rice and Cornell move down because they have relatively large engineering percentages. Dartmouth and Columbia just didn't produce that many engineering PhDs despite relatively high percentages of engineering undergrads. For example, with 600 engineering undergrads, Dartmouth produced 60 PhDs compared to Swarthmore's 49 with only 120 engineering undergrads.</p>
<p>BTW, I saved the little spreadsheet. So if anyone is interested in other schools, just do the legwork on the and tell me the total undergrad engineering enrollment at the school(s) you are interested in. I'll be glad to add to what we'll call the "monydad list".</p>
<p>Now we're talking sense. </p>
<p>Now to the original poster's question.</p>
<p>The "best" curriculum depends on what your interests are.</p>
<p>Many schools in the Ivy League are like bigger LAcs, and engineering is just one more thing you can major in, like Philosophy. The programs are not that separate from everything else. There is no separate admissions. Such programs appeal more to people who are not that sure of their interest in engineering, or have significant interests in the liberal arts that they also want to fully pursue during the course of their studies. </p>
<p>MY guess is that most of the people in these smaller programs don't really intend to become working engineers. They probably pursue graduate studies at a high rate, and seek employment in other areas to a relatively high degree. </p>
<p>The tradeoff for this flexibility is that the programs tend to be smaller. You can expect fewer courses in each area of engineering, and some specialty areas are probably not covered well at all.</p>
<p>The school in the Ivy League that has the largest engineering program, with probably the most comprehensive course offerings in engineering, and the most students who actually intend to become working engineers, is IMO Cornell.</p>
<p>It is true though that the Ivy League is merely a sports conference. An applicant to Cornell's Engineering college is probably more likely to be applying to MIT, Carnegie Mellon and RPI than to Yale for its engineering program, to pick one example.</p>
<p>My only piece of advice would be to really give serious thought to just how sure you are that you actually will stick to an engineering degree and become a working engineer. Many, many, many kids get to college and find out that they just don't really like what they thought the would at age 17. This is particularly true in sciences and engineering that are very difficult at the college level. </p>
<p>If you have gone to a pure tech/engineering school, you can find yourself stuck. The advantage of a school where engineering is one of many majors or programs is that you can easily shift gears without missing a beat. Sure, you can major in other areas even at MIT, but you are still stuck in a school that is overwhelmingly oriented towards science and engineering.</p>
<p>There are kids where there is absolutely no doubt that an MIT or a Caltech is the way to go. But, there are other kids where having the flexibility of a more all-purpose college probably makes more sense.</p>
<p>Interesteddad,
I'd like to check out a few schools, but to be consistent I need to use the same source as yours. Where do you get the data of number of Engineering Students enrolled and number of PHd's for the past 10 years? Can you give me an example with actual sources, say for Dartmouth, how you cam to 10%.</p>
<p>"Of course. Isn't that self-evident? "</p>
<p>It wasn't self-evident to me, for a long time. I saw those lists, produced by an LAC promoting it's own position on them, as pretty much indicative of what they were represented to be.</p>
<p>The bias of this approach against colleges & universities with diverse or specialized programs of studies did not become self-evident to me until a situation arose which led me to carefully examine the implications of this "ranking" (sorry) in a particular case where its shortcomings were quite apparent. As they are in the engineering case as well. Someone was making arguments using data of this type, and drawing absurd (to me) conclusions from it. Analogous to "WPI is better than Stanford for engineering". I knew his conclusions were wrong, and that led me to consider why the data he presented seemed to suggest otherwise.</p>
<p>I think many people would not have occasion to be making critical examination of this data as I did, and would merely take it at face value, as I did for so long a time.</p>
<p>I exported the PhD data to an Excel spreadsheet from the National Science Foundation WebCASPAR database they've been updating annually since 1920. It's actually broken down by category: Chemical Eng. PhDs, Mech. Eng. PhDs, etc. I just totaled the engineering categories.</p>
<p>60 students who received an Engineering PhD in the decade from 1994 to 2003 received their undergrad degree from Dartmouth College.</p>
<p>For current engineering enrollment, you have to dig around each school's website. It's usually found under Fast Facts, or the Dept. of Institutional Research, or the Engineering school website. Dartmouth's most recent numbers were 600 undergrads in the Engineering school out of a total undergrad enrollment of 4098.</p>
<p>If you want other schools, just find me the recent total undergrad enrollment (for a single year) in the engineering school or department. I have all of the other data already set up in a spreadsheet. I just need to enter the engineering enrollment. I've already wasted enough time getting the total undergrad enrollments, which are at least available from a single site: the searchable USNEWS website.</p>
<p>Monydad:</p>
<p>I see the PhD production lists as useful in four key ways:</p>
<p>a) If you see a school that is consistently at the top across many departments, you can probably assume that the school has a very good academic program and a high percentage of engaged students. I don't think PhDs are the end and all be all, but the things that go into making a successful PhD candidate generally correlate well with the things that make a strong academic department.</p>
<p>b) When looking at a specific school across many fields, you can start to see trends about particular areas of emphasis. For example, if you look at Rice, you can clearly see the science and engineering strength. Go to the enrollment data and basically half the school is majoring in math, science, or engineering.</p>
<p>c) When comparing reasonably similar schools, its pretty easy to see which ones have student bodies that tilt more towards academic/research career paths and which tilt more heavily to pre-professional careers. If you have a school where all the grads become corporate lawyers or investment bankers, you won't see a lot of PhD production. There are some pretty big name schools that clearly fit that bill, based on their relative lack of PhD production compared to their similarly presitigous peers. That's useful in trying to assess the campus culture. You could have two equally excellent schools that have a very different "feel" if they were at opposite extremes in that orientation. Personally, I think I'd gravitate towards a school that has at least some academia/research career oriented students, if only for variety.</p>
<p>d) It is a great tool for uncovering "hidden gems". When you see a school that isn't a shining star on the USNEWS rankings producing a lot of PhDs in certain fields, this is an indication that it might provide a lot of academic bang for the admissions buck. For example, some small schools like Kalamazoo, Earlham, St. Olafs, Occidental, Wooster, Beloit, Hendrix, and Knox are all in the top 50 in PhD production per 1000 undergrads. Those are schools I'd put on my list to look at if I were looking at less selective schools. They must have something good going on academically, in at least one department or their students would not be successfully completing PhD programs at reasonably high rates. Doesn't mean that these schools are "better than Dartmouth". That's silly. It's just a flag for a school with potentially solid academics and a decent level of academic engagement.</p>
<p>More PhD production doesn't necessarily mean a school is "better". That would be a stupid conclusion. It just means that a higher percentage of its undergrads go on to attain a PhD degree. There are many reasons that could contribute to that, including the type of students who select that school, the quality and intensity of the school's academic programs, and so on and so forth, the prevaling campus culture, etc.</p>
<p>I don't think this approach is necessarily useless, but whenever I've seen it done, very non-homogeneous schools were included in the same lists. In these cases, results were displayed that I consider very misleading.</p>
<p>a) if you see a school come out top in many departments- you can bet there isn't a particular large specialized college at that university that doesn't produce many Ph Ds. Due to the fact that few people in that particular specialized field get Ph Ds.</p>
<p>b) One can get the same info just by looking at enrollment data, no?</p>
<p>c) problem is that the lists that I've seen are never restricted to reasonably similar schools. If they were, then I agree. But once one of them has a large college of a different type that enrolls a lot of its students, then the schools are no longer similar for this purpose. You can make them similar by removing the enrollment from the "different" college from the denominator. That's pretty much all I'm saying.</p>
<p>d) I agree.</p>
<p>I'm not sure that having a large undergrad engineering enrollment would be a negative in terms of PhD production. Over the decade in question, engineering was the third most common PhD (24k) behind only Bio Science (37k) and Psych (29k).</p>
<p>Having large percentages of Engineering undergrads hasn't hurt Caltech, Harvey Mudd, and MIT. They occupy three of the top four slots in overall per undergrad production of PhDs for the decade -- largely because they have concentrations in two of the three biggies (bio and engineering).</p>
<p>Actually, having a large Econ department would probably hurt PhD production more as there were relatively few Econ PhDs. Although, virtually every school has a large Econ department these days. Heck, I bet that even Julliard has a big Econ department! I hear that concert cello/I-banker is a hot career path.</p>
<p>When it comes to Engineering, I would rank the Ivys as follows.</p>
<h1>1 Cornell University</h1>
<h1>2 Princeton University</h1>
<h1>3 Columbia University</h1>
<h1>4 University of Pennsylvania</h1>
<h1>5 Harvard University</h1>
<h1>6 Yale University</h1>
<h1>7 Brown University</h1>
<h1>8 Dartmouth College</h1>