@Coloradomama - The need and relevance of ABET was a subject in another CC thread, however:
ABET assures there is an acceptable standard of course content, curriculum coverage, teaching quality, and faculty/facility resources that are generally considered to be necessary to train an engineer who will be effective in his/her work. ABET solicits input from industry regarding what skills and capabilities engineers require to effectively do engineering work, which drives the basic course content and curriculum scope in accredited programs. The accreditation assures a uniform common standard that assures meeting that goal.
Of course, schools are free to develop curricula that exceed the basic accreditation requirements, as MIT and most other schools do. ABET does not dictate every single course in a curriculum or constrain the school from innovating and developing its curriculum as the state of the art in technology evolves.
The current ABET accreditation standards actually do require project work in each semester of the curriculum. When that standard was revised in 2000, many schools had to evaluate the costs of providing hands-on engineering design labs in every semester (whereas previously, only a final year capstone project was required).
Most of the corporations for which I worked, and the vast majority of engineering positions in federal and state governments, require an ABET accredited degree. If one is in a field that requires the Professional Engineer license, most state boards require the accredited degree to sit for the exam. Sometimes, exceptions are made but the process is significantly more arduous for the candidate.
I agree that in computer science, the ABET accreditation is not as widely sought and subscribed to by schools as in engineering, as it is not as old as the engineering accreditation. There isn’t generally any equivalent of professional licensure for computer science or programming (Texas, interestingly, has a software engineering/programming licensure program similar to that for PE). Certainly CS programs too benefit from having a basic standard of curriculum, course, and faculty coverage and I believe it will become more common as time goes on.
Medical and law schools for example have independent bodies accrediting them (AAMC and ABA, respectively in those cases). You do not hear Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, NYU, et al medical and law schools or their students (which are considered to be at or near the top of the heap in those fields) claiming that the accreditation is irrelevant to them “because we are Harvard/Yale/etc”. Perhaps engineering and engineers should take a lesson from them and support accreditation and licensing as a means to increase their professionalism. How many lay people think engineers fix computers, cars, wire houses, etc? They know what physicians and lawyers do for example. Your stance that ABET is somehow irrelevant to MIT “just because it’s MIT” is unfortunately too common. Deprecating accreditation because one thinks it isn’t needed and that the schools should not have to be accountable to an independent third party evaluator is simply wrong and doing so, again, contributes to the deprecation of engineering in the public eye.
If you claim that the accreditation is relevant only to “lesser schools” that MIT, well, I strongly disagree. What would prevent an unaccredited program at MIT from changing its curriculum in such a way as to not cover the essential subject matter engineers must have (please don’t say "it’s MIT, we know more than ABET ". The third party evaluation is an independent arbiter that legitimizes their decisions - see my previous comment on medical and law schools.
When you say things like a school is “known to have a top-notch curriculum”, etc., that is really a fluff statement. It sounds like advertising puffery from the school’s PR organization. No, a school is “not known to have” anything just because it says so or even the public may believe that. Without an independent third party evaluator (as in ABET), there is nothing to back up such claims.
I won’t hire an MIT/(insert school here) graduate just because he/he attended MIT/(insert school here). I expect that an engineering graduate of any accredited school is intelligent and resourceful. That person has to demonstrate during the interview he/she can do the job and has the potential to advance the corporation’s position in technology.
Many schools have interdisciplinary academic and design curricula. Many too have excellent career advising and on-campus interviewing. Many have technology transfer and business incubators that facilitate cooperative projects with industry, patenting, and starting new companies. No one school has a monopoly on these things, and again, the largest influence on a person’s career success is him or her, not the school.
This thread started with “do companies designate positions exclusively for MIT graduates”. As I stated before the vast majority do not give preferential treatment or designate positions exclusively for graduates of any particular school, at least I’'ve never seen that in any of the Fortune 500 corporations in which I have worked. I’m certain others will agree.