This goes back to the OP’s already evinced desire to go to graduate school. Why should he cram all of those prerequisites into his frosh year for the sake of a nebulous “earlier” baccalaureate graduation when it’s all going to come out even, in the form of a master’s degree anyway?
Not everyone can afford the extra time needed for BA/BS study that ABET-accredited engineering requires at Dartmouth. Or the extra time during MA/MS study taking courses to catch up on undergraduate prerequisites that they were not able to take at their BA/BS school.
We’re not talking about “everyone”. We’re talking about the OP.
Most graduate programs In BME will require a 4 year ABET accredited undergraduate degree. The challenge with choosing the A.B. or B.A. route for the few programs that may not care would be getting the engineering prerequisites.
This of course is presuming that the OP, who hasn’t returned, want to do Biomedical Engineering. That’s not specifically what they said. They used the term bioengineering which could also mean things like tissue engineering. Those programs are approached from biology. All three of the schools they mentioned would be great jumping off points for that path. Getting back to their ultimate question…one is not better than the rest.
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Thank you so much for all the info. I think a LAC without engineering program is not what I am looking for now.
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In addition to already mentioned Lafayette and Harvey Mudd, LACs with Engineering would include Swarthmore, Bucknell, Union, Trinity College (CT), and Trinity University (TX). Washington & Lee also has an Engineering major which is not ABET accredited although I don’t how important that is when the goal is graduate study.
Having been to all of those, I’d strongly advise visiting before getting too attached to the concept. There’s no more exposure to arts, social science and humanities than at most other engineering programs due to the rigidity of ABET requirements, and the facilities and curricula are limited. They are all fine, but there won’t be any additional LA exposure. That’s a myth everywhere but at Dartmouth, where the degree takes an extra year. It’s best to detangle an engineering degree from deep exposure to liberal arts.
Back to the OP, what type of school experience do you want, beyond getting into a solid graduate program?
I’m not sure what your point is. The OP was only focused on small liberal arts colleges. There’s more to the college experience than just the academic program. Students often have a preference for campus size and the vibe of the college, so my list simply presents other small colleges which do have engineering programs since that k8nd of college seemed to be where his preference lies.
Respectfully, that is not the case. The OP asked which of those schools had the best STEM prep for bioengineering. They pivoted, after learning more, and decided engineering was the right path. You can intuit that they want a small LAC based on the original list, but they’ve never expressly said that’s so. They want a school to prepare for a graduate degree in BME. That may be a small school. If so, any of those would be fine.
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I agree with @eyemgh that we may be going down a rabbit hole with the idea that the OP is interested in LACs per se. They were very specific about these three schools and judging from their posting history, they’re looking for colleges with high name-recognition.
It might be time for the OP to just start a new thread
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Here is a link to a student led bioengineering group at Williams, consider contacting the team leaders, good example of the unique student led research LACs can offer:
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I agree. The top LACs will go out of their way to “get you where you want to go”. Wesleyan has a whole section of its webpage devoted to getting into an engineering graduate program with just a BA., but the OP doesn’t seem like a natural fit for a LAC. I’m reluctant to hijack the thread into a lengthy discussion of something they’ve already decided isn’t for them.
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Obviously, graduates from top LACs can go into, and be found at, any graduate programs. The question is what the best path to get there is. There’re always tradeoffs between different paths. The path the OP should take depends on what s/he values the most, and whether s/he is willing to sacrifice something else for it. It isn’t completely clear to me what tradeoff the OP is willing to make from reading this thread.
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If you were asking about a foundational science, I’d say one of the advantages to the LACs in your title may be that they tend to graduate a greater number of, say, physics majors than LACs with available engineering majors, and sometimes more than universities as well. In a recent year, for example, Pomona graduated 14 physics majors, Dartmouth graduated 9 and Lafayette graduated 3.
Williams graduated 8 physics majors, and Amherst graduated 11. None of these numbers is particularly large – good if you want more faculty attention, but not so good if it means that upper level physics course offerings are sparse or limited (check catalogs and schedules).
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Getting back to the original question about comparing STEM at Pomona, Williams and Amherst, each has its distinctions but if you look at the STEM departmental websites for each of these three, Williams seems to have the largest number of faculty, combined with tutorials and summer research on campus. The overhead funding for NSF grants at Williams all goes to fund summer research for undergrads. When comparing NSF funding amounts, Pomona and Williams have larger research budgets than Amherst.
The OP pivoted, deciding that engineering would be the better angle, eliminating those particular school (I think as the thread has gone dark).
At the level the OP is attempting to play (elite LAC), as @Bill_Marsh points out, Swarthmore is the only peer institution that has engineering.
With regard to the Dartmouth dual degree program, we spent an accidental 20 mins with the head of the program a few years ago (a wonderfully nice man, who saw us wandering the halls of the Engineering building on a Saturday morning, and asked if we needed help. He then showed us around on a private tour for 15 mins.)
His “not so subtle” advice was to NOT plan to use the program. For those that do enroll at Dartmouth, it’s great, but he said the LACs dramatically oversell it, and that the combination of qualifications and leaving your friends for senior year really drags on the interest/ability of kids to use it.
Haverford also has programs with Penn / Cal Tech / Swarthmore. My daughter knows 2 kids in her class that went from Haverford to Penn for an ME… that program seems to have an unusually high admission success rate.
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