<p>How would one go about getting a liberal arts education as an engineering major? </p>
<p>I have heard of 3/2 programs, but is it possible to accomplish the above staying in one school?</p>
<p>Most universities have general education requirements that include a number of humanities and social sciences courses. One option is that you could select these courses to give you a consistent theme. Apart from that, I am not sure you can do much in a regular engineering program. Engineering curricula are usually packed and have very specific requirements in order to be accredited. They have limited elective courses available. If you want a lot more liberal arts courses then you will have to spend more time in college to take those courses beyond the engineering requirements. 3+2 programs are one option but you might be able to get the same kind of personal attention at one of the smaller [url=“<a href=“http://theaitu.org%22%5DAITU%5B/url”>http://theaitu.org”]AITU[/url</a>] schools which have a low student/faculty ratio and which often have good humanities and social sciences departments (degrees even). You might also find situations where these small tech schools have agreements with other nearby institutions for course sharing. My university, Illinois Tech has such an agreement with Shimer College which is located on the IIT campus and offers a Great Books curriculum. </p>
<p>This is a very misunderstood area that I learned quite a bit about because my son was very interested in exploring that path. It turns out that most avenues that promise that, don’t deliver and some that don’t, do.</p>
<p>For example, Bucknell and Lafayette are both heralded as liberal arts engineering schools. They are not. They are engineering programs that are wholly housed in liberal arts universities. The engineers do not get the full LA breadth that the non-engineering majors get. An ABET accredited degree requires so many classes that there isn’t enough time left to also get a broad LA education.</p>
<p>The counter, as @xraymancs alluded to, is that there is a fair amount of liberal arts required in any engineering program no matter where you go. WPI is a great example. They have innovative 7 week terms. Students only take three classes at a time, but one is always a liberal arts class. </p>
<p>3/2s have been discussed at length and have more theoretical promise than actual reward. Search other threads on that. I started as a fan, but quickly found they have real problems in practice.</p>
<p>There was only one school that truly offered what you seek in a structured program, Dartmouth. Thayer offers a FIVE year ABET accredited BS in engineering. All engineers who are granted a BS also complete the full D-plan that all other LA majors do. This comes at a price, an extra year and $300k, but you will have a broad liberal arts education AND an ABET accredited engineering degree.</p>
<p>In the end my son chose a tech school knowing he’d get quite a bit of liberal arts along with the strongest possible engineering curriculum.</p>
<p>Good luck.</p>
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<p>A typical engineering major degree program contains about 45-50% liberal arts – about 25% math and science and about 20-25% humanities and social studies breadth courses, though there can be variation across schools.</p>
<p>Note that some “tech” schools like MIT, Harvey Mudd, and Caltech have relatively heavy humanities and social studies requirements.</p>
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<p>Yale also offers students the option between an ABET-accredited BS degree (which is 4 years, not >4 years like at Dartmouth), a non-ABET-accredited BS degree in engineering sciences, and a non-ABET-accredited BA degree in engineering sciences. The latter two have fewer engineering requirements. <a href=“Degrees | Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science”>Degrees | Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science;
<p>Brown also offers a non-ABET-accredited AB degree as well as ABET-accredited ScB degrees. The AB degree has fewer concentration requirements and no breadth requirements. <a href=“Bachelor of Arts | Engineering | Brown University”>http://www.brown.edu/academics/engineering/undergraduate-study/concentrations/bachelor-arts</a></p>
<p>Stanford dropped ABET accreditation for some engineering majors due to reducing the engineering course credit minimum from 37.5% (the ABET minimum) to 33.3% of the credits required for the degree. Not sure why they did not offer the option of ABET versus non-ABET accredited bachelor’s degrees like Yale does.</p>
<p>From our tour at Lafayette, our guide was an engineering student and he is minoring in music and he was not in the minority of engineering students pursuing minors FWIW.</p>
<p>This is an important point. I’m not saying that you can’t do liberal arts and engineering at Lafayette or anywhere else. Your experience however will not be any different than it is at MANY other engineering programs. Music is the most popular minor for engineers at Lehigh for instance, a strong engineering program.</p>
<p>When I said Dartmouth is the “only,” it is the only option that will give a student a full, broad liberal arts education AND a BS in engineering. Anyone who does it in less time either compromises depth in engineering or breadth in the LAs or both.</p>
<p>The issue is, there’s no way to pack it all into 4 years.</p>
<p>I am all for expanding one’s mind and taking liberal arts classes. But at what cost? If it requires an extra year of college, then the cost can be quite high. A year of tuition plus living expenses plus the lost opportunity of a years employment. That could be around 40k for tuition, 15k living expenses and 65k lost wages; or around 120k total. </p>
<p>The alternative would be to get out of college in 4 years with some liberal arts classes to fill the general education requirement of most engineering programs. Then take some additional liberal arts classes at a local college at night while working during the day. After all, working doesn’t usually involve homework, so your evenings are free.</p>
<p>The liberal arts classes don’t make one more “employable”. As an engineering manager who hired around 40 college applicants over a period of several years, I just got out my yellow highlighter and highlighted the STEM classes on each applicant’s transcript. Never took a real good look at any of the other classes.</p>
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<p>That depends on the number of courses of credits you consider necessary for a “full, broad liberal arts education”. Is 45-50% of a bachelor’s degree enough? Or 62.5% in a school/major where the minimum amount of engineering work is the ABET minimum of 37.5% of the total of a four year degree program?</p>
<p>Even if you feel that a student needs 5 years (3 to 3.5 years of liberal arts courses and 1.5 to 2 years of engineering courses), then Dartmouth would not be the only option. A 3+2 program, starting at a “3” school that is not restrictive about one’s major, can give that schedule space. Of course, this comes with the usual costs and uncertainties of 3+2 programs (extra year of costs, uncertainty about admission and financial aid to transfer, etc.) that can make 3+2 programs less attractive.</p>
<p>Really what I’m trying to illustrate is that when people are looking for a liberal arts engineering education, different from what they perceive as a traditional engineering education, there really isn’t such a beast. Engineering at the schools purportedly known as LAC engineering schools is just like it is at the tech brethren schools. Engineers can’t easily do terms abroad, double major, etc. because the engineering curriculum is so focused, as it should be.</p>
<p>The only program I know of that understands those limitations and has a workaround that meets their institution’s ideals for both a liberal arts education and engineering is Dartmouth. It is necessarily five years to accomplish that.</p>
<p>I’m not advocating that as a good option. My son felt it wasn’t worth the extra year and extra money to go to a school where he felt like the engineering was not as good as the school he chose just to get the extra liberal arts.</p>
<p>3/2 are different. They are not at a single institution and have their own problems.</p>
<p>Again, my point is that many people seek something that really doesn’t exist in a capacity broader than what can be found in most “regular” engineering programs.</p>
<p>Look into Lehigh University IDEAS Major</p>
<p>“A typical engineering major degree program contains about 45-50% liberal arts” - That can be a misleading statement, especially for novice college researchers. Yes, calc is math, and liberal arts includes math… but calc is not the humanities kind of liberal arts that most people think of. </p>
<p>For most engineering programs, there are about 20=25% of what I consider “non-techie” classes. That would include freshman humanties (lit / writing), required econ, required management class, etc. </p>
<p>In my MechE program, it was usually about 1 of my five classes (3 credit each … most schools are set up with 1 credit labs, but mine was not.) Sometimes it was 2 per semester, but I think that was because I added at Tech Communications concentration. I only had 2 totally free electives, and one got used up because I started in CivE (surveying). </p>
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<p>You can certainly double major at one school. It usually takes an extra year. If you go to a less expensive school, it may not cost that much. For example 5 years at UWisconsin is cheaper than 4 years at MIT, except for the lost income you would have in the 5th year. I’m sure the same is true at other schools. </p>
<p>I like HPuck’s suggestion and is in fact what I have done. I’ve taken a number of Harvard Extension classes in the humanities just to use that part of my brain. It’s very enjoyable. </p>
<p>“Humanities” requirement for me came out to be exactly 20% of the number of units to graduate. I had a number of unrestricted electives that I used to better prepare myself for my career. As I stated previously, I always was looking to hire the best prepared engineering graduate. As with my case, that usually involved using one’s unrestrictive electives on engineering classes; usually UPPER division engineering classes.</p>
<p>My suggestion to take the liberal arts classes once you are out of school is from experience. I have taken classes thru the local community college (film photography, digital photography and a classic literature class), thru the local adult education program (landscape water color painting) and even from the adult version of high school. The high school class was in auto mechanics and basically gave you the run of the high school auto shop one evening a week. Several other guys were restoring an old classic car on that one night a week. It was even fun to listen to them as they must have discussed each thing they were doing for about twice as long as it took to do. You can really enjoy these classes without feeling guilty about not doing your other STEM homework (because you don’t have any).</p>
<p>Here’s a link to Colorado flagship (CU Boulder) - example MechE curriculum. I picked it because the nice clean format. enables easy review. Obviously each school will vary a bit.
<a href=“http://www.colorado.edu/engineering/academics/degree/mechanical-engineering/sample-curriculum”>http://www.colorado.edu/engineering/academics/degree/mechanical-engineering/sample-curriculum</a></p>
<p>It looks like 21 credit of 128 are what I’d consider non-techie. </p>
<p>OP, what is it about a liberal arts education that you want, while getting an engineering degree?</p>
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<p>Then people should just write “humanities and social studies” or “H/SS” if they want to exclude math and science from the category. “Liberal arts” includes math and science.</p>
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<p>A key point to be aware of when attending a four year school is that it is a rare opportunity to take upper division courses. Many lower division courses are readily available at community colleges, but upper division courses are not. So, while attending a four year school, if you are choosing between an upper division and a lower division elective (whether in or out of major), the upper division elective is more likely to be a better use of your limited time at a four year school, since the lower division elective may be available later at community colleges (unless it is in a relatively esoteric subject).</p>
<p>Aren’t math and sciences considered part of liberal arts? I know I’ve seen BA’s in those and Phi Beta Kappa admits them (whereas Tau Beta Pi does not).</p>
<p>As an aside, I felt as though I had a good exposure to non-technical topics, but turns out those only make up 20% of my requirements :-/ I could have bumped that up to 28% but instead chose more science/engineering electives.</p>
<p>I’m looking for the same liberal arts/engineering mix. And I’m not sure if you’d agree on me with this, but to me it has nothing to do with being “more employable” or anything, I just like a lot of different subjects.
The schools I’m looking at right now are Swarthmore, Harvey Mudd, Tufts, Wash U, and the Ivies. All these schools have solid engineering programs while allowing students to study humanities, and even do study abroad programs. </p>
<p>As I mentioned earlier, my son was interested in the same and we visited all of those schools except Wash U. He wasn’t interested in Cornell, but did visit Brown and Dartmouth along with Tufts. He also visited Bucknell, Lafayette, Olin. </p>
<p>What we all began to notice is that the engineering was not created equally. I can not stress this enough, but you have to visit a wide range of schools to ensure that you’d be happy with an engineering degree from one of the smaller programs. On paper, Lafayette and Lehigh might look similar, but they are not. Lehigh has far more toys. For my son, after viewing multiple programs, that became increasingly important.</p>
<p>You will compromise the quality of your engineering experience if you choose a program like Swarthmore. They just don’t have the resources. If you don’t look, you won’t know what you’re missing.</p>
<p>Now if you want to be a quant in the financial world, none of that matters. If you want to practice engineering, it does. Go visit.</p>
<p>It ended up that he didn’t apply to any of the schools that he thought would offer more liberal arts. He did chose schools that were undergraduate education focused, but that had more robust engineering labs, shops and clubs. </p>
<p>Good luck.</p>
<p>Yes, Liberal Arts includes math and science. But usually they are lots of choices. In Engineering, most math and science is done in prescribed, sequenced courses. Usually they involve intense homework (problem sets). </p>
<p>I know a lot about this. DH and and I are MechE. DS is an Comp/EE student. DD started in Undecided Engineering, but the intensity and lack of course choice was tough for her. She focuses better when interested in the class. She did well in Econ, which had lots of of course flexibility. </p>