Question(s) regarding Engineering Schools

College Majors Engineering Majors
1

I have some questions for the resident engineers about engineering schools. Since I am a lawyer and my wife is a doctor, we have limited knowledge regarding engineering. Our kids are exceedingly interested in the area, particularly mechanical, naval, computer, and aerospace. My problem is, my advice and direction is limited.

I know to look for ABET-certified schools. I realize that, generally speaking, naval and aerospace engineering are subsets of mechanical engineering (correct me if I am wrong, please). It is my understanding that no matter where you go, engineering education is pretty much the same for the first two years. Where I run into a wall, though, is knowing anything about what schools employers look at, what schools are more “hands-on” with regards to instruction, etc.

For example, my kids learn better in a hands-on environment where they have the opportunity to work with their professors and peers on projects. My concern is that a lot of engineering schools are research driven with the professors tasked to the research and graduate students tasked to teaching. Personally, I would rather the professors have a more active role in the classroom.

Additionally, a lot of schools boast dual degree programs, such as streamlined BS/MS or BS/MBA programs. Facially, these seem like wise investments, but not being in the field, are they? Do engineers actually get masters degrees before joining the workforce (hell, I have a master’s I never use…I didn’t pay for it thankfully).

What should I be looking for?

So far we are interested in Cal Poly SLO, Colorado School of Mines, and Iowa State. But, I know I am missing some schools. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks.

2

Disclosure first…you asked for engineers. I’m not one. Having been in your shoes 4 years ago, I learned quite a bit about vetting schools.

The first two years are not the same at all schools. In fact, that experience can vary pretty widely. Curriculum maps will paint that picture for you.

My son is a ME at Cal Poly. They start with engineering classes specific to ME (albeit not true engineering because no one has the math and physics foundation yet) first year. Compare that to our state flagship Oregon State where students don’t even declare ME until third year. Although Cal Poly has always done it that way, more schools are moving in the direction of getting students involved beyond the books earlier to improve retention.

There is always a battle between the “hands on” and " theory" camps with the argument that you have to compromise one, to have more of the other. My son’s experience has not borne that out. His curriculum has both.

Other schools he might be interested in, to name but a few, are Lehigh, WPI, RPI, Harvey Mudd, Rose Hulman and Olin. Mines had a reputation as a grind when my son was looking.

As for the combined programs, the MBA doesn’t seem beneficial as most places want experience prior to movement into management. The MBA signals that tech work is not the primary interest and can inhibit getting hired for the technical experience.

A coterminal BS/MS can have benefit, especially for a student coming in with AP credit. There is typically a pay differential for MS and the 4+1 makes getting it more efficient. The drawback is that a student might not know what they want to focus on until they’ve been out in the workforce. Some employers will pay if they take that route.

Good luck in the quest.

3

I’m not an engineer but my husband and daughter both are (Electrical and Mechanical, respectively) and we looked at a lot of colleges when deciding where she was to apply. You have all the right instincts - ABET certified is key. One thing that a lot of people don’t realize is that the name of the engineering school counts with employers - a lot. And it’s not the big names you’d hear for liberal arts or law - as much as I hate to say is, consulting the US News lists of "Best Schools " for Undergraduate Engineering is actually helpful. All ABET certified schools will have a core set of courses. All of them likely make the engineers bust their asses to survive them. :slight_smile: So what are the differences? Access to research, access to internships, access to “toys” (equipment) - and then the basics of what it’s like to attend a school - location, dorms, food, cost, size.

I personally think the joint degrees will be a waste unless the kids don’t really want to be actual engineers. A joint MBA/BS is useful for a business consultant but not for someone who wants hands-on engineering work. So I wouldn’t see it so much as a cost savings as a focus - where do they want to focus their degree?

Another thing to consider is attrition - to be brutally honest from what I know all good engineering programs lose students to other majors because the workload is so heavy. And engineering employers do look at college grades. So you don’t want a kid limping along with Cs and Ds (it happens) because there’s no other majors they are interested in. I would make sure the school has strong programs in other disciplines so there’s built-in back-up plan.

Your point on research focus and grad programs is valid but keep in mind very few engineering programs are very warm and fuzzy in terms of teacher interactions - engineers aren’t built that way, lol. There are some good liberal arts schools that have engineering programs and that may be an option that would work for your kids. My spouse looks down on them (being honest here) but he’s an engineering snob. My daughter’s criteria for that was that the grad school couldn’t be bigger than the undergrad school. That worked out well for her. FYI - my daughter is at Purdue and their research and hands-on opportunities for undergrads have been amazing. So don’t think that the a large school necessarily means one where the student has to fight for resources.

And, lastly, look for programs your kids can get into and know what some of the best programs have rolling admission (looking at you, U Mich!). My daughter was waitlisted at programs where she had the stats but applied too late in the Fall - the applicant field is truly overwhelmingly well-qualified, so love those safeties! And good luck! It’s a great field to go into when you love it! All the engineers I know love their jobs.

4

Attrition out of engineering tends to be higher at less selective schools, for obvious reasons.

In terms of employers, a recent NACE survey found that around 70% of employers (all industries) used GPA as part of initial screening of applicants who are in college, and around 60% of those used a 3.0 cutoff GPA (so there can be a large difference in getting interviews between a 2.99 GPA and a 3.01 GPA).

5

Some useful links:

The American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), keeps a profile on most engineering programs in the US. It’s very useful in quickly determining which degree programs are available, typical student profiles, information on faculty, etc.

http://profiles.asee.org/

The ASEE also puts out a yearly report, “Engineering by the Numbers” that does an excellent job of presenting a summary of the data that’s available in the college profiles. For example, Which are the most popular majors?

https://www.asee.org/documents/papers-and-publications/publications/college-profiles/16Profile-Front-Section.pdf

6

For most careers the prestige of your engineering school will not matter. However there is an advantage for some of the big name companies. Well known engineering schools have better recruiting which helps give somewhat of an edge. For instance at Ucla google I always here multiple times a quarter for recruiting sessions which is something that prob wouldn’t happen at a lower ranked school.

7

All engineering programs are recruited by local, in region, companies. However, some are better recruited by national firms. These schools are targeted by these companies, and they end up sponsoring design teams, having dedicated on-campus recruiting sessions, etc.

One factor to look at is career services and job placement. Taking a look at the employer participants at the career fair, which gives you a sense of which companies recruit at that college. Here’s Iowa State’s Spring career fair participants:

https://www.engineering.iastate.edu/ecs/career-fair-employer-participants/

You can also use LinkedIn to pull up the alumni for a school, sort by “Engineering” and see where that schools engineering alumni work and live.

https://■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/school/164452/alumni/?facetCurrentFunction=8

Finally, many of these schools put out post-graduation surveys. These can also be useful.

https://www.engineering.iastate.edu/ecs/salaries-demographics/

It’s possible to spend days and weeks doing research on these schools, before you even take your first visit. I would recommend against over-analyzing or putting to much weight on any one factor.

Good Luck!

8

I wholeheartedly agree with @Gator88NE. We tend to want to find the perfect fit, and in reality, lots of schools will match and none of them will be perfect. No matter where he goes, there will be things he doesn’t like. It’s largely what students make of their opportunities no matter where they go.

The secret is to find a list that meet his wants (location? weather? non-academic activities? sports? etc.) and to go visit them. After visits, he’ll develop a gut feeling that is accurate.

I remember asking my son during Parent’s Weekend first year if he felt Cal Poly was the perfect fit now that he’d been there a while. His response was telling. He said he liked it a lot, but that he was sure he would have been fine at any of the schools he applied to.

9

Even at research universities, this is generally not how it works. Professors are tasked with research and teaching. How that plays out in the classroom will vary pretty greatly between one professor to another. Graduate student involvement will vary quite a bit as well. In most research universities, graduate students serve as TAs and graders while also working on their own classes and research under the tutelage of a professor. The professors still teach the majority of the actual classes. This is true of engineering departments, not necessarily large classes like calculus.

As an example, based on the buyout that would be required for me to not teach one course, my department (of 600+ students) expects that my job is about 37.5% teaching and the rest is divided up between service and (overwhelmingly) research. However, my actual involvement in the research is more on the funding and advising side, while the grad students are the boots on the ground down in the lab. Honestly, I don’t even have my grad students teach at all unless they ask. I just pay them up front to do only research. That’s more valuable to me as a PI.

10

We are facing the same dilemma. I don’t know if my son has a “perfect fit”, which is totally fine. We live in the Northeast and there a lot of different types of engineering schools.
We are struggling to understand why kids choose like Brown, Tufts, Yale, Harvard etc over schools like RPI, MIT, WPI.
I think my son could probably be happy at any of them if he could get in, but I don’t know why he should one type of school over the other. I totally get the “acceptance rate” dilemma and all that. But aside from that, it is difficult to tell what may be best ,and what school may provide the best education and best end results. It is confusing.

@eyemgh I’ve liked reading your posts to gain some perspective. Thanks to anyone else chiming in.

11

At the end of the day, you have to plant a flag, take a stance and pick a school. Often that choice will be driven by cost and acceptances (especially if applying to very selective schools), other times the student will make the choice based on their “feelings”.

All we can do as parents, is help them build an acceptable (in our opinion) list of schools to consider. If we’ve done that correctly, then everything else will fall into place…

12

My son is having the same dilemma (not selective schools, though). He’s having a hard time separating Colorado State, Washington State, and Montana State right now. I’m hoping our upcoming visits help him out, because he comes out of the local meetings interested in each one! I wish there was one that was clearly better – in that this is the one that will get you a good job after graduation with a salary you can afford to live on in your chosen location – but I can’t figure that out.

13

I’ve looked at ASEE. I’ve never thought about looking at LinkedIn, probably because I am too old to think it is useful.

14

Thanks for all the feedback.

15

@RightCoaster, I’m no expert. We were simply fortunate to visit a lot of schools that aligned with my son’s perspective on what he wanted his college experience to be like (direct admit to ME, ME starting 1st, or at worst second year, “typical college experience” no deep south, proximity to outdoor activities, smaller classes).

We visited Brown and Tufts, and found Tufts charming and the students to be happy, but in the end, it didn’t stack up to the quality of engineering that he was looking at elsewhere, especially considering the cost. We all found Brown underwhelming with its amoeboid campus, but the town was charming. Some students LOVE Brown. In the final analysis, the facilities and curriculum just didn’t make the cut compared to the other options.

He did apply to both RPI and WPI and was accepted to both. He agonized between WPI and Cal Poly until a few days before the deadline.

Students who want engineering as an access point into finance might be well served at Harvard or Yale, but otherwise, we didn’t feel like any of the Ivy League except Cornell could match the engineering quality of our state flagship, Oregon State. A school’s overall reputation might not be reflected in the quality of the engineering department.

At the end of the day, LOTS of schools will be good options. Look at where Fulbright recipients come from. Frequently they are Podunk U. I believe you vet based on the qualities important to the student and then let them go with their gut.

16

^^. I agree, lots of schools will be good options. So hard to pick just one!

17

I was a Fulbright a long time ago, but I have no idea where to see where Fulbright recipients come from. Is there some aggregate listing online?

18

https://www.cies.org/article/2016-2017-top-producing-institutions-fulbright-us-scholars

Here’s a partial list:

19

" There are some good liberal arts schools that have engineering programs and that may be an option that would work for your kids. My spouse looks down on them (being honest here) but he’s an engineering snob"

I am an engineer, but I have limited experience here (still at same company that hired me in 1984). But I’m under the impression that a lot of hiring managers are also engineering snobs. That does not mean that a student should avoid a liberal art / engineering experience if that is the best fit (for preferences and family finances). He/she just needs to be prepared to work a little harder to get that first engineering job.

20

@Peruna1998

I am a graduate in economics from WPI who was surrounded by engineering majors and interactive with engineers for ten years. I am not an engineer.

Educators often describe engineering education as “boot camp.” I first heard this term years ago from a dean at WPI. It was, and largely still is, a widely held view of engineering education. There is no getting around the academic rigor of calculus, physics and chemistry followed by thermodynamics (particularly thermodynamics for Chem E). There is not a lot of space to take a break from the the classic classroom approaches to engineering. There is however another school of thought and another approach.

In 1967, WPI had an engineered faculty revolt against the traditional approach. It was engineered by a new President. I was a student on the school newspaper at the time. The school felt trapped between academic and fiscal competition from MIT, RPI and U Mass who all offered the same courses. They put together a committee composed of faculty who were known to question the established process and were known to be creative. A major influence came from an engineering faculty member who had been educated in the English university system and MIT. Other faculty came from everywhere. The humanities department was looking for creative ways to find some fresh air. Supported by the administration they were able to obtain the largest, at that time, funding ever given by the NSF to develop and test new educational approaches for engineers. Their efforts were somewhat protected by an NSF panel of well credentialed educators as ABET gave WPI enough space to try new ideas. From the trenches, it truly looked like a revolution!

It took a long time, but there was a significant award from the National Academy of Engineering in 2016 at: https://www.nae.edu/Activities/Projects/Awards/GordonPrize/GordonWinners.aspx#tabs

There are two books on this, but I won’t give you the entire story here.

The first design taught us that some very bright students where good in the classroom, but were very poor at pulling solutions to a problem out of their natural environment. Classrooms were not a good vehicle for this part of the learning process. The vehicle selected to better develop this cognitive learning was the Major Qualifying Project (MQP). Projects in real world settings where students had to take an active part in designing the approach to solutions and had to learn how to play better in groups. Contrary to popular belief, most engineering today is not the product of an isolated genius’s eureka moment, but they get all the PR.

Project teamwork also taught us the importance of interdisciplinary thinking for the best design solutions. WPI calls this vehicle the Interdisciplinary Qualifying Project (IQP).

Best of all, we learned that project activities fire the interests of participants. Enthusiasm and team spirit ease the pain of boot camp.

To see the educational design used today see https://www.wpi.edu/project-based-learning/wpi-plan.

As for job opportunities and income, it varies largely on the major and where you live in the country. Many schools have detailed job and graduate school placement data. MIT, Stanford, Caltech degrees generally receive a premium at the start but biology majors will still go hungry. My niece solved that problem by going into patent law. She did not want to slave at low wages for years to earn a PhD and build the reputation required to fund her own lab. It is hard to get CS majors from WPI and many other schools to go to graduate school because of their BS salary offers.

The income opportunities for most engineers are circumscribed at the VP engineering level without an MBA. I learned this by working with many WPI alumni.

:bz