Never liked the “pre-engineering” concept at CU.
Supposedly, CU engineering admits have 3.93-4.00 high school GPA’s Wholly grade inflation! But, on a national scale, these same 3.93-4.00 GPA students have fairly average standardized test scores. How do you reconcile that? Bottom line, college admissions is a bit of a game. Don’t get too hung up on a particular school.
The entry level CU engineering courses (where an actual professor speaks in person) are massive in size - 500 students. Labs for those classes (30 students) are often taught by “TAs” who speak English as a second language with difficult-to-understand dialects. Entry level CU engineering courses are graded on a curve with 10 percent-ish getting an “A” grade. The majority get a “C” grade or below. Pre-engineering students have to outperform direct admit engineering students on the grade curve to transfer. One or two bad experiences in labs where TA’s struggle with English can be a real factor in the kid’s chances. I don’t know where the 25% success rate of comes from. Sounds like a made up number. I’d like to see a number published by CU if there is one.
Having one kid a direct engineering admit at CU and another a pre-engineering admit, I would strongly advise that if a kid has an opportunity at another quality university as a direct admit to its college of engineering, that is the better option relative to admission as a pre-engineering student at CU.
@MileHighTuition - I wish I had your post last spring, very helpful! My son was admitted as a pre-engineering major for this Fall 2018 with an unweighted GPA of 4.0 and weighted of 4.3, SAT 1460. He had 2 AP classes senior year (Calc BC and Physics) and a few Honors classes as his public high school highly discourages overloading. The CU admissions officer did make a comment that his class rigor was on the lower side. We were very impressed with the campus, the updated lab spaces, and the student culture (“Be Bold”) but were concerned about the chances to be admitted in, and the weather. My son ultimately decided to go to Univ Washington Seattle in a similar setup - admitted direct to the college of eng, but still needs to apply into the major. Reading your post now, I am very glad he chose UW even though the tuition is similar, he is closer to home in CA, has excellent english-speaking teachers for math, chem and english and doing well overall.
Parents/Students please check out the prices for attending any college/Univ. before submitting
applications. Know that CU Boulder only guarantees Freshman housing and Boulder City is very
expensive rental market. Also checkout campus maps for location of housing in relationship to major
course bldgs., campus is over 600 acres. All you want to know is on line…just Google CU Boulder
and your question.
For the incoming student, with high GPA’s and test scores, who want Aerospace Engineering Science.
CU Boulder is the place, hands on learning from day one! The new Aerospace Bldg. will be completed
in July 2019. CU Boulder is NASA’s # 1 funded Public University, with plenty of opportunities for
experiments. Colorado is the #2 employer for Space companies and #1 for Startup companies.
For 2018 Per Environment Colleges, you may be interested in alternative ways to enroll University of
Colorado Boulder:
Biology Programs - ranked top 5% in USA
Chemistry Programs - ranked top 10% in USA
Engineering Programs - ranked top 10% in USA
Geology Programs - ranked top 20% in USA
Weather Programs - ranked top 15% in USA
This University is expensive, but it does have tuition locks guaranteeing the price for 4 years over the
past several years. The area has lots of distractions! If your student isn’t Academically Oriented, you
can be looking at 5 or more years to graduation. BA/BS programs are set for 4 year completions, including
Pre-Engineering, where students are taking the regular Engineering courses, but thru the College of Arts
and Science, which is cheaper tuition, compared to the College of Engineering. Thus, if a student finds
out Engineering is not his/her bag…the cost is cheaper. Not everyone who starts Engineering stays. It
is a very demanding major, with 16/17 unit semesters. Please check out the course sequence for your
students major. They aren’t going to be living in 12 unit semesters, as others in some majors, with plenty
of extra time. Therefore Engineering students are better off living with others in their major.
Agree. CU is a quality University with many very good programs. Agree. Tuition is high. To get fair value for the high tuition the University should take more care to staff teaching positions with persons who speak English well enough so to not detract from students’ learning experiences.
Agree. Off campus rentals are ridiculous - Midtown Manhattan level prices close to campus. CU should buy up the properties surrounding the University so it can offer more housing options at reasonable rates.
Despite its drawbacks and room for improvement its a nice place for kids to spend their college years.
@Ann of the Hill has a nice post. I would add Physics is ranked top 10, at CU Boulder, and the undergrads get a lot of attention in math and physics. Undergrads at CU in physics can work at JILA, NIST, or LASP as well as many strong physics labs across campus. Teachers are excellent, and one of the best programs in the country.
Students usually find housing without a problem but it is more expensive in some cases than other college towns across the USA. Most students save money by cooking for themselves.
Tuition is about the same as all public programs of the same caliber. $53,504 with housing, so the same as GaTech, UIUC, a bit more than Purdue, less than U of Michigan-
https://www.colorado.edu/admissions/cost
Note U of Michigan is $67,850 per year!!! Pretty outrageous but kids line up for Ann Arbor.
https://finaid.umich.edu/cost-of-attendance/
Housing in Boulder has always been for freshmen and upper classmen live at home, in apts, in Greek houses, in houses both in Boulder and surrounding towns. It’s the same at most flagship universities. It is very expensive in Boulder but if you are willing to walk a little farther, you can get cheaper places. My nephew lived on the Hill for 3 years and it was really expensive. This year, as a grad student, he lives in a house very near the engineering school and it’s lot cheaper. I lived a little farther east and walked through the tunnel, up passed engineering and business to my classes in the old campus every day. Good exercise!
It’s a very nice school (said as a proud Forever Buff). My daughter went to a much lower ranked engineering school yet has a great job. Her school also focuses on aerospace, and those grads also get top jobs (astronauts from that school too, though not as many as from CU). Life is good for engineers.
Wow! Surprised to see this post living on.Here’s some hard earned info - not CU specific.
My kid is finishing his first semester at a Big Ten program. For those of you reading this post and wondering about which school your kid should choose, I advise calling up the head of undergrad studies in your kid’s expected major and asking for the stats on
a) percentage who get into the major among those admitted as Freshman
b) what happens to the kids who don’t
c) what is the median grade in calc and physics.
Remember, all the kids who get in are pretty good. Maybe your kid will rise to the top right away and make a smooth transition to the chosen major, but maybe your kid won’t. Maybe your kid will get mono. Maybe your kid will have a rough transition. Maybe your kid will enjoy the freedom a bit too much… Maybe a 400 student class isn’t an environment that brings out their best. Maybe your kid will thrive. Like I said, all our kids were pretty darn good as high school students.
The goal is to become an engineer. Sure, some of our kids will find the process too rigorous and need to move on, but I would think hard about spending this money for a program with a high burn rate. Do your homework.
Good luck to all.
PS. My kid is very happy now. He is a solid but not stellar engineering student after one semester. He has substantial merit aid, so if he wants a minor, we can pay for another semester. He will get to be the major he wants. He might not have been so lucky had he chosen some of the other schools that were willing to take our money.
Although a 25% success rate from pre-engineering to an engineering major looks bad, it looks like the actual criteria are not that difficult – a 2.700 overall and technical GPA (no technical grade lower than C) is the main threshold:
https://www.colorado.edu/pre-engineering/how-pre-engineering-works/admission-engineering
For comparison, average GPAs at Colorado have been around 3.0 or so:
http://www.gradeinflation.com/Colorado.html
Based on what it takes to transfer from pre-engineering or a community college to CU Engineering, it’s my impression that enough students drop out of CU Engineering the first year that CU is open to accepting students from other programs who show they can handle the first two years of courses and continue to show interest in engineering.
I think CU Engineering tries to take the most qualified directly into the program but knows that it won’t keep all of them, so the school wants to keep its options open to accept other students after their first or second year of courses.
This is from a 2011 New York Times article. The point I get from this is that it is better to go to an engineering program that you will actually finish than to one that is rated higher but is so intense you may become discouraged and drop out.
——
“You’d like to think that since these institutions are getting the best students, the students who go there would have the best chances to succeed,” he says. “But if you take two students who have the same high school grade-point average and SAT scores, and you put one in a highly selective school like Berkeley and the other in a school with lower average scores like Cal State, that Berkeley student is at least 13 percent less likely than the one at Cal State to finish a STEM degree.”
Link to article?
“STEM degree” includes more than engineering.
https://engineering.berkeley.edu/admissions/undergrad-admissions/general-undergraduate-program-faqs says that “Approximately 85 percent of incoming freshmen graduate from the College of Engineering and 91 percent from Berkeley overall.” (meaning that 85% of frosh engineering majors complete an engineering degree, and another 6% complete some other degree, which may or may not be some other kind of “STEM degree”)
So the claim that you quoted suggests that if you took 100 UCB engineering frosh and enrolled them in one of the many CSUs with their engineering majors, at least 98 of them would graduate with a “STEM degree”?
My comments haven’t posted when I include a link.
Here is the title and date.
Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just So Darn Hard)
By CHRISTOPHER DREWNOV. 4, 2011
The students with the best stats are accepted directly into the college of engineering. Statistics aren’t everything, so quite a few of them find that engineering is not for them, or even that school is not for them, and they change majors and drop out.
Students that aren’t quite as high in stats are accepted into the pre-engineering program. Their stats are good (or they wouldn’t be accepted into CU at all), but not quite as good as those accepted directly into the COE. It’s likely that even more of this group are going to decide engineering is not for them because it is too hard or they don’t like math or physics as much as they thought they did. Since the pre-engineering students are allowed to participate in all the same courses and live in the engineering housing and for all intents and purposes are engineering students, I don’t think they are disadvantaged by being ‘pre’ rather than accepted into the COE. They have a guaranteed path into the COE by doing the exact same course work as the freshman engineers.
If there was a limit on the number of pre-engineering student who will be accepted into the COE, I’d worry more about it, but the way it is set up, it is entirely up to the student to make it to the COE. Take these courses and pass and you are in, but fail them and you are out. If you were in the COE and failed those classes, you’d be out too.
@Coloradomama - Engineering is hard for very good reason. If a physician makes a mistake, a person may die. If an engineer makes a mistake, tens, hundreds or even thousands can die. Medical school is easy compared to engineering. My engineering team designs aircraft and spacecraft inertial navigation and flight control systems. If we make a mistake, the plane crashes and 200 people die, or the spacecraft sent to Mars goes off course and a $100 billion mission is lost. You definitely would not want someone who cannot grasp calculus, physics, chemistry, strength of materials, structural analysis, electronic circuits, computer science, et. al., to be designing that plant producing your medicines, aircraft on which you are riding, water treatment plant that assures the safety of the water you drink, bridge on which you are driving, medical device on which your life depends, 100 story skyscraper you work in, et al. Engineering influences the public health and safety to a far greater extent than any other profession.
Well, here is the link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/why-science-majors-change-their-mind-its-just-so-darn-hard.html
Looks like the article conflates engineering majors and pre-meds (and note that the title has “science”, not “engineering” in it). Given the very different characteristics of the two paths (and note that pre-med is not a major, but can be done with any major), conflating them can result in deceptive conclusions.
The pre-med path is an aggressive weed-out path everywhere – most frosh pre-meds eventually realize that their GPA and/or MCAT is not high enough to be realistic for medical school admission and do not apply. Of those who do apply, fewer than half get admitted, and most who get admitted get only one admission to medical school.
In contrast, engineering need not be a weed-out path, depending on the school. California publics do not practice intentional weeding out, since a 2.0 GPA and C grades is enough to continue in the major. Even among engineering schools which do have weed-out processes where enrolled students need higher GPA or grades to enter or continue in the major, the weeding out is nowhere near as aggressive as for pre-meds (e.g. CU pre-engineering students need a 2.7 overall and technical GPA, far lower than the 3.7 that pre-meds have to aim for).
Yes, engineering is relatively hard, so many students do decide that it is not for them and switch out, even if they are not forced out by weed-out GPA or grade requirements, or by not meeting a baseline of 2.0 GPA and C grades. But it is not like the pre-med path.
What I was reassured about Chang’s research is that there can be value in attending an engineering program that isn’t ranked as high. If you are hardworking and brilliant, go to Berkeley or another top program. But if you aren’t, you may do better in classes where you won’t be in the bottom in comparison to your classmates.
That might be reassuring to parents and kids who aren’t admitted to their top choices, or who choose to go to a school based more on cost or reputation.
I know several CU engineering students who graduated at the top of their classes, got the job offers they wanted, and eventually went into tech sales anyway. They got bored in the lab and saw more career potential in sales. And they got tired of hitting a salary ceiling in straight engineering and saw the sales people earning more because of commissions and bonuses.
I’m tossing all of this out because I wonder what opportunities there might be for students who won’t have the GPAs and test scores to make it directly into CU engineering, but might still have the potential to go into engineering via another route.
I mean based more on cost THAN reputation.
I wish there was an edit option here.
“I’m tossing all of this out because I wonder what opportunities there might be for students who won’t have the GPAs and test scores to make it directly into CU engineering, but might still have the potential to go into engineering via another route.”
Plenty!!!
There are tons of ways to become engineers besides getting into a relatively well-ranked engineering school on your first try.
There are people working in the highest ranks of the field who did not take a direct path. I know one personally.
University of Colorado - Boulder is one of many well-ranked-but-not-elite engineering schools out there. Many students will find others to be a better fit and will have many ways to become engineers.
One thing to keep in mind is that although engineering comes with higher than average starting salaries, traditional engineering jobs tend to max out. To make more with your engineering degree means moving into sales, management, etc. Anything where compensation is tied to income brought into your company.
Because engineering is a hard degree, a student may decide that long-term career goals can be achieved via a different major.
https://typesofengineeringdegrees.org/highest-paid-engineering-jobs/