ISU is a public university and has a different mission from private universities. Access is important, especially in such a small state. Iowa only has 3, public 4-year colleges (ISU, UI and UNI). (Iowa also only has 2 private, non-profit 4-year universities, Iowa Wesleyan and Upper Iowa University).
I don’t think we can fault ISU over it’s lack of selectivity. It’s engineering program is still well respected.
@Gator88NE - The important statistic is how much of the attrition is due to factors such as the students not being able to handle the work, the faculty not teaching effectively, not having enough places in the class, and environmental/social factors as opposed to reasons such as students who decide engineering isn’t what they really want to do, they want to be closer to home, they prefer a larger/smaller school, etc. The first three in my view are indicative of the school whereas the latter are personal choices of the students. If most of the attrition is due to the former, that is of more significant consequence than the latter. The ASEE statistics do not differentiate between causes of attrition, they simply combine all of them into one number.
Yes, less selective (particularly public) universities (and the community college stepping stones) serve an important function for access to students who are late bloomers or whose high school records show damage from non-academic problems (medical, family). Of course, college is harder than high school, so higher attrition is expected, but some will succeed and graduate. Engineering majors are among the harder majors in college, so it is not surprising that attrition is often higher out of engineering majors generally.
But a strong student should not worry too much about the attrition rate if s/he studies engineering a less selective school that does not practice intentional weeding (grade/GPA requirements higher than C/2.0 to enter or stay in the major), since the students who leave engineering will generally tend to be the weaker ones. I.e. the student’s personal risk of being unable to complete the engineering degree for academic reasons probably varies much less than the attrition rates of the schools. (Note, however, that many students drop out of college because they run out of money, so it is important to attend a college that is affordable.)
@Engineer80, National Labs and Centers of Excellence are different. Stevens does not have a National Lab. The only National Lab in NJ is at Princeton. The scope, size and funding of National Labs is far larger. Ames Lab is one of the smaller ones with roughly 400 employees. Compare that to Lawrence Livermore with almost 6000. Below is the list.
Can’t imagine two more different places to live than Ames and Hoboken
@Eyemgh- the national labs and other federally funded facilities you name serve a different purpose than the Federally Funded On-Campus Research Centers (FFOCRCs) such as the ones at Stevens and other universities. The national labs are government facilities that were paid for and built by federal agencies. The affiliated universities (such as Caltech which manages Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Princeton which manages the Plasma Physics Lab, et al) are contracted by the federal agencies that own the labs (JPL for example is a NASA lab, PPL is a Department of Energy lab, etc.) to manage their day-to-day operations. The affiliated universities did not develop or build those national labs, they are just contracted managers for them. So, suggesting that they are somehow unique or special in that they “have national labs”, is not really true. Those schools are hired by the government to manage them rather than the sponsoring agency running the day-to-day operations of the lab itself. Some of the employees of the national labs are employees of the university manager while others work directly for the sponsoring federal agency. Of course, the university manager also typically has students of their own doing work in the lab and conducting research projects. From the business standpoint this arrangement is no different for example, than an owner of rental properties hiring a management company to collect the rent, repair the plumbing and wiring, screen tenants, make sure the property taxes are paid, etc.
There are also private non-profit corporations that are designated as Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs). They are privately owned and managed, but they are chartered and funded by federal agencies to do research specific to those agencies (e.g., MITRE Corporation (Air Force and FAA), Battelle Memorial Institute (NIH, EPA, and others), Aerospace Corporation (which was the developer of GPS - Air Force), and several others.
BTW, I worked at one of the national labs so you need not tell me what their purpose, administration, or functions are.
@Engineer80, I’m aware. Thank you. I was responding to this that you said “Stevens has four national laboratories.” They do not. They have zero national laboratories. That in no way doesn’t mean Stevens doesn’t have something to offer. They certainly do. It was meant to reassure the OP that National Labs don’t affiliate with random schools and that Iowa State’s affiliation with Ames Lab is a positive data point for Iowa State. It is in no way a negative point for any of the other schools in question. I don’t have a dog in this hunt. My son considered all of them except Illinois and chose not to attend any of them.
Anyone basing decisions on Payscale data doesn’t understand Payscale and how awful it is as an unbiased source of data. It is all self-reported and is therefore not a representative sample of a given school’s graduates. It also does nothing to control for cost of living. Stevens graduates are heavily represented in the NYC area, for example, so their salaries will sjew very high but that doesn’t mean that their purchasing power will be any greater than an Iowa State graduate with a lower salary living in St. Louis (for example, since I know Boeing hires a ton of Iowa State graduates). The point here is not to say the graduates of either school are superior or inferior to one another, but rather that salary is a terrible indicator of such things, and the salary data from sites like Payscale are a poor indicator of salary anyway.
Regarding the process of weeding out students, I think it is dramatically overblown. Very few schools (if any) actively try to weed out good students. Most, in a moment of candor over a beer, would probably admit that weeding out some students (specifically the ones that simply aren’t prepared or motivated enough to handle the material) is a good thing. However, most if not all schools nationwide actively attempt to improve attrition rates. State schools also often have dramatically higher attrition than private schools because their public-school missions generally mean less selective admissions regardless of the strengths of their programs. The bottom line is that no school is going to try to “weed out” an otherwise good student. No school really actively tries to weed out anyone these days. It just happens for various reasons.
Finally, @eyemgh alluded to my opinion on the value of graduate research to undergraduate programs, but I think he underestimated how strongly I feel that way. In most cases, I think a strong graduate research program is a very positive thing for the undergraduates at a school. Professors who are up to date with the cutting edge of their field are better able to use relevant, modern examples and incorporate their experiences as researchers into their curriculum. The presence of strong research programs also typically means there are undergraduate research opportunities to be had should a student want to do that, which can be very beneficial to students who choose to do so.
All of the schools on this list have a good reputation and they are all at least reasonably active in research. I’m a little surprised there is so much hand wringing and argument over this (though I’m not really surprised given this is CC). There probably isn’t a wrong choice here, though I’m honestly a little surprised that @MonsterCrwu chose Stevens given how enamored they seemed with ISU.
This isn’t true. Lyman Spitzer and John Wheeler founded and built what was eventually named PPPL and Theodore von Karman and his students built JPL. That PPPL eventually became a National Laboratory and JPL an FFRDC doesn’t change the fact that the respective universities are integral to their founding, history, and operation. Students from the respective universities still work at both labs.
Well, it was announced a few days ago that ISU will host the federally funded Center of Excellence for Swine Genomics! :@) :@) :@)
ISU does have a FFRDC (Ames Laboratory - Dept of Energy)
Are we trying to compare federal funded R&D? If so, it’s easier using NSF’s website. It even breaks it down by field (like Engineering)
https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/profiles/site?method=rankingBySource&ds=herd
However, I’m not sure how it may directly relate to the posters questions…
@Gator88NE, that was me who brought that up. The OP was concerned about the stature of Iowa State. I brought that up as a reassurance, since the school affiliated National Laboratories don’t tend to be linked with random podunk institutions. It was really a “Look, they have an affiliated National Lab…they must have something good going for them.” We then got a little tangenty in defense of the other options the OP is considering.
True, probably few. But they are among the more popular schools for engineering, such as Wisconsin, Purdue, Penn State, Ohio State, Virginia Tech, Texas A&M, where capacity limitations mean that GPA/grade minimums higher than 2.0/C are needed to get into (from a pre-engineering status) or stay in one’s choice of engineering major. For example, Wisconsin chemical engineering students need a 3.5 technical and 3.0 overall GPA to stay in the major, according to https://www.engr.wisc.edu/academics/student-services/academic-advising/first-year-undergraduate-students/progression-requirements/ .
@Gator88NE @Engineer80 @eyemgh @boneh3ad All of you have given some very good points about schools and their perceived values asan engineering institute. SO Thanks A lot for that. I have eliminated UC boulder and Worcester for various reasons as there program is no better than any other schools mentioned, since they are all very good. I think Top 20-30 engineering school in the US is very good considering how many engineering schools there are.
@Engineer80 @boneh3ad @eyemgh I talked to the associate dean yesterday of Iowa State, since after reading so many comment on this thread and others that Iowa State was a very good school and due to state policies it accepts students and only the weak students who cant study engineering get weeded out, I felt better and wanted to know a bit more. Incidentally he talked about the National Labs and Centers of Excellence on Campus. which is exactly what you guys have been talking about here. They talked about the engineering program and that the college hosts the Largest career fair in the country with almost 460+ companies attending every fall and 350 companies in spring.
It turns out that Iowa State has about 7 Centers of Excellence, Four Federal Research programs , and a National Laboratory Named as the Ames Laboratory ( From what they told me it was one of the most important Laboratories in the US in 1940-50’s because of the Research they did in Manhattan Project. and these days work with Material Science, High Computing and many other fields. They have 3 Nobel Prize winners on Campus two of them are on faculty who also conduct research at lab and one of them is a scientist at the LAB.)
Iowa State also has the worlds highest resolution virtual reality machine? ( If that’s what they called it, don’t remember) Its named as the C6 and there are only 6 in the entire world, and this is the only one in the US. It is used by some of the biggest companies in the US and Europe to do research. They also have a National Tornado Simulator lab, which is the most advanced lab for tornado research in the world. They also talked about the 2 super computers that have on campus. and they were the top 100 fastest in the world when they got them in 2009 or something.
The thing they were most proud of was the Center of Non Destructive Evaluation, which is an Aerospace research facility that is sponsored by Rolls Royce, Space X, NASA and many other big companies to do research on that helps them fly planes and rockets throughout the world.
Your comments have given me so much knowledge about the schools and how important they are for this countries research. @boneh3ad @eyemgh @Engineer80 do you guys know what AAU is ? they kept on telling me that this is a huge thing for research schools and Iowa State is one of only 62 universities in the entire continent that is part of the organization. These are the members for it https://www.aau.edu/who-we-are/our-members
they all are huge universities. only UIUC, UC boulder is part of it, I don’t see Stevens and Worcester in them either.
is that something as prestigious and important as they are talking about ?
@ucbalumnus so they said that all engineering students study the same stuff in the first 2 years which is called the basic program and they require a 2 CGPA to get into Junior and Senior level classes. They also told me that there are plans in the college to increase the threshold to 2.5 CGPA
I would put the most stock into what your gut tells you. From what I read, you dig Iowa State. I’d go there. All of the choices have strengths. All will have weaknesses that will only be apparent once you arrive on campus. It’s far more about making the most out of your opportunities than it is about trying to parse out which might be “better” by objective data.
As for AAU, it’s yet another piece of data. I’d put very little emphasis on it. My alma mater, University of Missouri, is on the list. I hardly consider it a paragon of higher science. Certainly they have their competencies, but there are lots of very good schools that aren’t members.
Meaning that they are within capacity (so that all students with 2.0 GPA can continue in their choice of engineering majors, i.e. no intentional weeding), but at least some majors are reaching or threatening to exceed capacity (so that the threshold for at least some majors will be increased to 2.5 GPA, i.e. intentional weeding, but less aggressive than at some other schools where a GPA as high as 3.5 may be needed for some majors).
Although a 2.5 GPA is relatively low (many employers use a 3.0 GPA screen as one means of reducing the number of applicants to choose for relatively scarce interview slots), frosh year carries the highest risk of low GPA, since not all students initially adjust well to college, even though they may earn better grades later in college. But that carries an increased risk of being weeded out of your preferred major compared to the current policy of needing a 2.0 GPA, if the policy change will apply to you if you attend.
^^ Yup - everything I’ve read here from OP sounds like, “I really really want to go to Iowa State but need reassurance that it wouldn’t be a mistake.” I can’t see why it would be a mistake. It is indeed not ideal that so many students wash out of engineering there, and that the overall grad rate is so low… but I don’t see any reason to assume that OP would be a casualty of that process. The weeding happens early, and I would expect that the cohort that carries on from there is strong and enthusiastic. Stevens could be an equally good choice, even a better choice for many students, but in this case OP’s gut seems to say Iowa State, and I see no reason the gut should be overruled.
@Mastadon From the data on asee Iowa States engineering program is the 7th largest in the country, as opposed to others which are not even top 20, does having large programs help schools ?
The 2018 ACT scores for Iowa State Engineering are 26-31
Steven is 29-33
Worcester is 28-32
so they look pretty similar considering Iowa accepts about 80% of the students and so I am assuming that the ones left after attrition would be students with upper 28-29 ACT score
I really don’t want to have this debate again, but this really isn’t why those schools have implemented a pre-engineering program and it’s misleading to insist so. They aren’t trying to cut good students from their programs. There are several very laudable goals that are generally behind those policies.
First, many incoming engineering students pick a major based on very incomplete information (as should be obvious from reading these boards) and the rate of students switching majors even within engineering is high. This is particularly problematic at large schools where departments are generally at capacity, so students end up dropping because their desired engineering major is full and they don’t like their current major. Therefore, by putting them through a pre-engineering program, they can make a more informed decision about their major and be less likely to drop out or fail out. In that sense, a pre-engineering will actually help increase retention.
Second, especially at the state schools that tend to have these programs, there are a sizable portion of the students who have insufficient or barely sufficient high school preparation for the rigors of the engineering course load. Many of these students are the ones who get slapped in the face by the early classes and end up struggling. Either they fail courses and ultimately drop out, or they barely pass courses and then really just scrape by for the rest of their time in the program as they remain perpetually behind the curve due to the poor start. This isn’t good for the students or the university. The pre-engineering programs don’t help with the students who are so poorly prepared that they fail out rapidly anyway, generally speaking, but they can sometimes help with students who would otherwise be scraping by. If they get a C in calculus, which is passing but far from mastery, they may end up retaking it to get their GPA up for admission to their major, which would hopefully improve their understanding before starting core upper division courses. This is at worst neutral when it comes to attrition.
It does mean some of these more marginal students may end up on the 5 year plan, but one extra year of tuition is still better than wasting 3 years of tuition before realizing your are hopelessly lost and dropping.
Of course, the bad side is that it increases the stress level specifically related to having to re-compete to get into your specific major. Also, there is of course no guarantee that a student will get into their first choice of major, either (though I believe most of those schools at least claim they have a pretty good track record there). Still, at worst those programs are neutral to attrition rate and, really, ought to actually improve retention. Most of the people who are “weeded out” by they would have been anyway, and some will end up staying that might have otherwise dropped.
I really think it’s overly cynical and disingenuous to say that those schools implement those programs as a means of weeding students out. That is not the case.
The AAU is more like a seal of quality earned by research institutions. They are only for PhD-granting institutions and are a sign of the level of research being performed at the school. Generally, the schools that are members don’t have a lot of tangible benefits other than perhaps more say in how the organization lobbies, but the distinction is highly-sought by non-member schools. It is really more of an indirect benefit to students due to what it signifies.
Large has good and bad connotations. The good aspect is that large means large revenues for the school (usually) which often means more money (and simply more students) for updated labs and clubs and such. It also means that, if you want one-on-one time with professors, you will have to actively seek it out rather than just sort of have that nearly by default at a small school.
There is probably some correlation there, but you’d be surprised how many people with a 35 struggle at first. A lot of the kids on the high end have never had to work for anything in high school and never developed any study habits to speak of, so they get hit hard at first when they can’t just breeze through college classes.
The upper limit of the middle-50% range, as well as the lower limit, would go up after attrition. I think you can assume no meaningful difference in the stat profiles of the graduating classes. Follow your gut. If the weeder classes worry you, put the money you’d be saving aside and find a great math/physics tutor on Wyzant, and work with them from day one so that you don’t have to scramble to find help when you bump up against something hard. Join the clubs you’re excited about, form study groups with the other serious engineering students, and you will be fine.