<p>So I was looking through the ABET accreditation website and noticed only a few of Stanford's engineering undergraduate programs are ABET accredited. I'm wondering why this is, especially considering Stanford's supposedly strong engineering reputation. I'm interested in going into bioengineering and am worried that Stanford's program isn't accredited whereas other schools I'm considering are accredited. Would it be better for my future's sake to go elsewhere (like to Hopkins or UPenn) to receive an ABET accredited education? Thanks in advance!</p>
<p>An employer is not going to care (or even check) if the program at Stanford is ABET accredited. ABET accreditation only comes into play if the school reputation is marginal.</p>
<p>Most (perhaps all) of the engineering dept’s interdisciplinary majors are not accredited for good reason. One being that, for accreditation, almost 3 years of credit hours are necessary to complete the major, which only a few of the majors satisfy. Another being that the program must culminate in a “major design experience,” which only the larger engineering majors can successfully pull off. </p>
<p>So…it doesn’t matter that it’s not accredited? </p>
<p>Stanford describes the varying accreditation for different majors as “by choice of the departments and the School; lack of ABET accreditation is no reflection on the quality of the department or program.” Several other top tech programs also choose not to participate in ABET. For example, the top 10 USNWR ranked CS programs are listed below along with their ABET status. Note that the majority of the top 10 do not have ABET.</p>
<ol>
<li>Stanford - No ABET</li>
<li>CMU - No ABET</li>
<li>MIT - ABET</li>
<li>Berkeley - ABET</li>
<li>UIUC - ABET</li>
<li>Cornell - No ABET</li>
<li> Washington - No ABET</li>
<li>Princeton - No ABET</li>
<li>UT Austin - No ABET</li>
<li>GeorgiaTech - ABET</li>
</ol>
<p>I suspect that several of Stanford’s departments choose not to participate because they want to choose different requirements for their majors than the standard ABET structure, in many cases more rigorous than the ABET requirements. I’d expect the importance of ABET to primarily relate to employment. If an employer is not familiar with a particular college, seeing that it has ABET gives him confidence that the college meets basic educational requirements and is not a diploma mill. Most employers are quite knowledgeable about Stanford’s quality of education and wouldn’t need to perform such a check. If you look at employment statistics for Stanford’s engineering grads, you’ll see that they exceed or rival nearly any college, and little correlation between ABET and employment among top programs.</p>