Ranking Schools...

College Majors Engineering Majors
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<p>First, I want to preempt the calls to use the search button. I have, and I'm not satisfied with what I've found.</p>

<p>So, here's the question, how does one rank colleges and universities that offer engineering?</p>

<p>The usual retort is to go to USNWR, but their undergraduate rankings are SO flawed, that it is practically useless. It is based on surveys of institutional reputation only as asked to other institutions. The graduate ranking is only slightly better, but it's ranking graduate programs, not the undergraduate experience. It tends to only focus on giant research behemoths that tend to be sink-or-swim grinds. As one student described Cal Berkeley, "It's like going to school at the DMV."</p>

<p>I'm looking to find programs that nurture everyone who gets in, not the ones who expect 50% to drop out. I'm looking for the schools where engineering is part of a broader educational experience. I'm looking for programs that produce working engineers who are passionate about what they do.</p>

<p>Where can I find a rank based on positive "undergraduate experience"?</p>

<p>M</p>

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<p>Not to be too blunt, but I wouldn’t think too highly of a school that “nurture[s] everyone who gets in”. That sounds fine in theory, but in reality you have to leave some people begin in the dust. The bottom line is that not everyone can hack it in engineering and if you spend too much time trying to nurture those people who are simply not motivated enough or likely never going to get it, you harm the education of the rest of the students. Ideally you’d help everyone and they would understand, but realistically, you can’t.</p>

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<p>Blunt is OK. ;-)</p>

<p>Obviously some will fail. What I mean by that is schools that put a significant emphasis on undergraduate education, like Cal Poly SLO and Olin versus an undergraduate experience where there are 600 students in Physics and the professors won’t have a clue who the undergraduates are, like, say UIUC or Purdue. </p>

<p>Sink or swim is not without its own merits, but on the whole really not the best way to teach or a very fun environment to learn in. Yet the current rankings, that I can find, favor those institutions. They are based solely on the research and the opinions that those at the top, who also have an incentive to favor research, of the other programs.</p>

<p>M</p>

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<p>I won’t to note that at UIUC as you get past the science and math gen eds and into classes in your major, it isn’t actually that huge of a class unless you’re in CS or ECE, especially at 400 level courses. Getting to know a professor personally in gen eds isn’t really important, though still possible if you go to office hours. I will also note that many of the teachers here actually really try to help their students, even if they don’t know you personally, like in a 600 person physics class (I think the largest classes are actually at most like 150 though).</p>

<p>Anyways, I heard that if you go to engineering schools that have decent engineering programs but aren’t the top dogs for research, the professors focus a bit more on teaching. Might want to look into some schools like that!</p>

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<p>I think what you are pointing out is that there are several axes to determine the best fit for a particular student. </p>

<p>I don’t think that the graduate rankings are flawed at all because for the most part, those rankings correlate well with recruiting and grad school placement. What’s universal is that engineering is hard. However, it’s usually harder at the higher ranked places because their professors most likely came out of that environment themselves and thus have really high expectations. For a really strong student this is a good thing. It’s analgous to why so many future NFL players come out of Top 25 football teams. It’s brutal and the competition is fierce, but if you survive, you’re better for it. </p>

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<p>Schools with more resources or that are harder to get in will be less sink or swim. Places like Purdue and Georgia Tech admit more students than can be successful. Berkeley is in a state that is broke and severely cut their budget. There was a poster a while back who was a graduate TA and couldn’t believe the ratio of students per TA at Berkeley compared to their Big 10 undergrad school (which I think was Wisconsin). They simply don’t have the resources to provide more personal support. The top private schools, and an incredibly well endowed public like Michigan probably can and do provide more support. MIT has almost unlimited support to help people who can succeed. When I was at MIT, I found that a lot of students had a lot of trouble dealing with needing help because they never needed it before and they were used to breezing through school. It didn’t feel too good to them to struggle. Those that got over it did well. Those that were too full of themselves had a lot of issues. By October of freshman year, most people were sufficiently humbled and were able to do fine. There are always a few tragedies every year though. </p>

<p>For some students, a more personal experience at a small private reserach university might be better. The RPIs, Lehighs, and Cases are all really hard, but they work with the students who maybe got the 720 on the Math instead of an 800. These are still research institutions, and are still hard, but these schools have the resources to make most students successful, and they rely on undergrads to do a lot of research because their grad programs are small. Grad schools are full of grads from these programs. </p>

<p>Then you have schools that are just not as hard so they are probably not going to crush their students. Maybe Tufts, Rochester, WPI, Rose Hulman, RIT. Each of these has their own balance on what matters to them. I know that for Tufts, they prioritize a global education over a hardcore engineering education. They tell you that up front. Well, if you know that you want hardcore this isn’t it. Tufts and Rochester are reserach institutions, but they seem less intense. WPI students seem really happy. </p>

<p>I’m not crazy about engineering programs at a LAC (Lafayette, Bucknell, Union, etc), and I don’t know any engineers from these programs, but it seems limiting technically. You often have to take the courses that the professors want to teach rather than what you want to learn. The only exception is Harvey Mudd which is a LAC with an engineering focus. I do know Mudd graduates, but that’s an option also. </p>

<p>So I couldn’t come up with a ranking on a single axis, and I wouldn’t even try.</p>

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<p>RockerDad, you really hit it on the head. I’m not maligning the rankings of graduate programs, just saying that they are that, rankings of graduate programs, as are, by virtue of the methodology, the undergraduate rankings.</p>

<p>You mentioned several schools that my S might be interested in, Mudd, Lehigh, Lafayette and Bucknell. Here’s the rub, how do you compare them in relationship to their engineering? The other factors are pretty straight forward, non-engineering education, location, size, etc.</p>

<p>Here’s another question. USNW now ranks Rose-Hulman ahead of Mudd and Cal Poly SLO. Based on what? Certainly not on its entrance selectivity.</p>

<p>Last, how do I know that the LAC engineering programs are inferior? They just don’t have a reputation, because they don’t produce much research.</p>

<p>Is there a semi-objective way to sort this out?</p>

<p>Maybe more importantly, what’s going to be the difference in the final product, the newly minted engineer entering the work force, if they attend an ABET accredited school that is less rigorous.</p>

<p>M</p>

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<p>Welcome to the world of academia.</p>

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<p>You could look at a specific program for example, I think your son was interested in MechE. Look at the 4 year curriculum and see what they study? What kind of electives are offered. Look at the registrars page and see if the courses in the catalog are actually offered? Look at how many graduates they produce in MechE every year. That’s not the class size, that’s the number of people who actually graduate with a degree. </p>

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I don’t know, and I don’t agree with it. I don’t know about Cal Poly, but on that list I would have put Mudd, and Cooper Union one and two. These are very intense places as rigorous as MIT or Cal Tech. Like all of these smaller places, there are limitations. Mudd doesn’t have specific engineering majors, and Cooper doesn’t have much of a campus feeling though it is in Greenwich Village. I think the last time they a study of baccalaureate origins of STEM PhDs 34% of Mudd graduates ended up with a PhD in STEM.</p>

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<p>I don’t know? Are they producing enough engineers to be relevant? Or do they offer engineering because some students might want to study it? I think it’s nice to have enough size to offer enough course selection to take electives. You can’t tell what you’re going to be interested in at the get go. I don’t see how LACs can offer enough unless they are focused on engineering like Mudd. I don’t see how they achieve critical mass.</p>

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<p>Here’s an interesting data set. It is the USNWR rank, in parenthesis if they are ranked among schools that do not offer doctorates, followed by the number of engineering classes they offer according to the data each school sends to IPEDS.</p>

<p>23 Harvard 35
(17) Union 39
44 Dartmouth 57
3 Cal Tech 66
(2) Mudd 74
(6) Cooper 102
(25) Lafayette 141
(9) Bucknell 156
16 Rice 159
58 Tufts 164
1 Stanford 234
39 Lehigh 327
8 CMU 399
2 MIT 431
75 Oregon State 513
8 Cornell 663
(8) Cal Poly SLO 955
5 UIUC 1070
5 GT 1644</p>

<p>First, it’s hard for me to believe that Harvard warrants a ranking remotely that high. </p>

<p>Beyond that, he’s interested in all but Harvard and Union (engineering too small), Cooper (doesn’t want urban and school is too focused), Cal Tech and CMU (tech only focus), and UIUC (too big).</p>

<p>The “data” is hard to reconcile. </p>

<p>Why is Cooper good at 6, but Bucknell weak at 9 even though Bucknell offers more engineering courses? There can’t be a statistically significant difference between 6 and 9.</p>

<p>How does Cal Poly SLO at 8 (no PhD) compare to Lehigh at 39 (with PhD)? </p>

<p>Mudd at 2, but where you can only get a general engineering degree vs. Cal Poly at 8 vs. Bucknell at 9?</p>

<p>And where does good ole’ Oregon State, the in state engineering flag ship fit. Is it de facto better than a smaller school that doesn’t offer PhDs just based on its size?</p>

<p>I don’t think there is an objective ranking system that can answer those questions. </p>

<p>Thoughts?</p>

<p>M</p>

10

<p>All rankings are flawed in one way or another. If the program is ABET accredited, then the quality of the education obtained is, to first order, determined by the effort the student puts into it. In all the posts above, I don’t see my university, IIT, listed. This is likely because our USNWR ranking is not great right now (these things do fluctuate unless you are at the very top of the list). Nevertheless, I have had my physics major advisees consistently get into what are considered top 20 Ph.D. programs and the same thing can be said for our engineering graduates from the perspective of getting good jobs or going to graduate school. So what does the ranking mean?</p>

<p>You just need to determine your short list based on a set of criteria which are important to you and then go visit or at least talk to admission people at these schools.</p>

<p>For engineering, you can expect that all programs are challenging, it is simply the nature of engineering. However, you can start by asking yourself the following, remembering that each option has pros and cons:</p>

<ol>
<li>small or large school?</li>
<li>private or public?</li>
<li>urban or rural?</li>
<li>research oriented or not?</li>
</ol>

<p>This will allow you to refine the list a bit and then you can look at selectivity, average ACT/SAT and other objective metrics that will tell you if your student is going to do well or struggle. The most important thing may be finances so make sure that the financial burden is not too stressful on the student and the family.</p>

<p>Unfortunately, this is probably not a definitive, satisfying answer but these decisions are usually personal. Just don’t get hung up on the rankings too much.</p>

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<p>I don’t have an answer to your question, but we were asking the same questions a few years ago! It mostly came down to doing lots of research about different schools, reading reviews in the Fiske Guide and Princeton Review, campus visits etc. etc.
My son came from a tiny high school and did not want an engineering school that was large, impersonal and cutthroat. Challenging and rigorous -yes, but not hyper-competitive.
Many of the schools went out of their way to say that engineering education has changed and their goal is not to flunk out x% of engineering freshmen students (as the parents remember college!) but to support every student. We asked lots of students on campus about their impressions too. Do they kids study together etc. Also see if you can find how the school did on the National Survey of Student Engagement.
My son is now at WPI which he loves (real-world project-based focus and “happy nerds”). He also loved Olin, Cornell, Brown and Tufts. Applied to Bucknell and Lafayette. We liked Union but he did not. My husband has worked with Union grads and says they were all great engineers. U. Rochester almost made his list too. Clarkson would have been OK except for the remote location. He was on the fence about CMU and RPI - didn’t think anyone looked happy there, though we weren’t at RPI for long.
Anyway, I think you need to do your own research to find the right “fit” for you. Good luck!</p>

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<p>Thanks xray. I’m actually not hung up on ranking at all, but use USNWR just to point out how worthless it really is.</p>

<p>I’m just trying to find some objective information on schools. If USNWR is to be considered objective, which again, the methodology is based solely on surveys of institutional reputation, then how does one reconcile the fairly widespread like for Cooper Union #6 and dislike of Bucknell #9? </p>

<p>I respect ClassicRockerDad’s opinion after many hours lurking here, plus he lives in the neighborhood. Something doesn’t jive; 6 and 9 are not statistically different in a ranking like this. So, where does one go to find the wizard, the one behind the curtain that knows all the truths?</p>

<p>IIT is not on the list because there’s no mountains. :-(</p>

<p>He hasn’t narrowed all of his selection criteria yet, but he does have some certainties. </p>

<p>-not urban, thus far, suburban and smaller are OK
-private or public OK
-ideally 12,000 ish or smaller, but considering Oregon State and Colorado State as they would both be cost effective and both have good honors colleges.
-must be ABET accredited, but also must have at least some liberal arts. Wants to take philosophy and psychology for fun and wants to continue mandarin.
-must have a reasonably developed engineering program as evidenced by course catalogue. He set Dartmouth, with 47 engineering classes as the baseline.
-ideally accessible to skiing and hiking. Many people say put that off, but he’s been skiing so long, that he doesn’t have any memory of not being a skier. It’s obviously not the top factor or his list would be short, Utah.
-lastly, as he sees the world right now, research is a low priority. That’s why he ultimately chose engineering over physics.</p>

<p>Some things will begin to sort themselves out as he visits schools.</p>

<p>M</p>

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<p>Thanks BTG!</p>

<p>I think he is going to go the same route. I think I just need to ignore those who claim if it isn’t MIT (or substitute UIUC or GT or Purdue) that its no good.</p>

<p>M</p>

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<p>

That’s probably tied to the caliber of student. Cooper is uber competitive, Bucknell is not. </p>

<p>

Engineering research is not science. It’s not discovery, it’s synthesis. It’s looking at problems in novel ways that leads to their solution. High quality engineering research solves a specific problem in a way that makes a significant contribution to the field and changes how people think. Read the descriptions of the research programs of faculty at the highly ranked schools and you’ll get an idea of what are hard problems of great interest. This is the cutting edge of technology. </p>

<p>My point is that you learn only so much in the classroom because it’s often abstract, as I think it should be. It’s abstract because you want an education for a 40 year career, not just your first job. Abstraction creates a framework for solving problems. The way real problems are solved is by breaking them into smaller and smaller pieces until they fit into an abstract framework that you are familiar with and can solve. Then you put the pieces back together. Coop or research are really necessary to make abstract things concrete. Being involved with them is enabling. I think ignoring the opportunities to get involved with real things is a mistake. </p>

<p>Also I think the number of courses offered was interesting. I dug a little deeper. I was curious about Bucknell. I went on the website to the EE department. On the first page is the class of 2012. I counted - 16 students. Then I looked at what courses are in the catalog. Impressive list. Then I looked at what courses are currently actually offered that weren’t required. I can’t even figure out if there are any. Even some required courses aren’t offered when they are supposed to be (EE347 - spring) - maybe the professor is on sabbatical? Several required courses would be electives at larger schools (ex E347 microcontrollers). Basically, I think it’s a very limited program. </p>

<p>If you look at Cooper’s spring offerings, they seem to offer a lot more variety, though it still has it’s limitations. I give Cooper my vote.</p>

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<p>I know quite a few engineering researchers who would argue with you on this to the grave, including myself. You have just described some engineering research, not all of it. The ultimate fundamental problem most of my colleagues are working on is complex enough that even Heisenberg gave up on it. The bottom line is that this statement is overbroad. There are plenty of engineering research projects that are solely applie research. That may even accurately describe most engineering research. It hardly describes all of it though. There are many researchers still soon very fundamental research from an engineering background.</p>

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<p>Heisenberg from Breaking Bad or Heisenberg the uncertain? ;-)</p>

<p>Cooper is über competitive because it’s tuition free. That same fact has caused it to slip a notch academically because their endowment hasn’t grown rapidly enough to keep up with their budgetary pressures, thus salaries haven’t kept pace. Their acceptance rate is low, similar to Stanford, but their pool of applicants is much weaker as evidenced by average SATs and GPAs.</p>

<p>I’m not dissing Cooper, but compare their 25-75 Math SAT range of 600-770 to Mudd’s, 740-800 and it becomes quickly apparent that they are competing for different students. </p>

<p>Again, not pumping Bucknell (or anyone else up) or putting Cooper down. I’m just looking for an evidence based reason why at the end of the day a student would be better served by one particular program versus another.</p>

<p>M</p>

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<p>boneh3ad, fair enough, no disrespect intended. </p>

<p>However, my point was more that a potential undergrad should care about research even if he or she wants to be a working engineer because it’s a great opportunity to make abstract concepts more concrete and gain access to cutting edge problems. The most fundamental research may or may not do that for someone intending to be a working engineer, but the applied research certainly does. </p>

<p>Eyemgh, I believe that Cooper Union’s range includes the architecture and art students also, who are admitted more based on a portfolio, hometest and other criteria. The engineering students are the ones at the high end of the math scores. I agree that Cooper is very different from Mudd, which are both highly focused on the techniical and is very different from Bucknell. </p>

<p>Again, I think you should compare the actual offerings and opportunities at each small school and see if the small program you are considering has sufficient critical mass and variety of opportunity for your student or are they being steered to one or two areas, or overly limited by the small size. </p>

<p>Personally, I think a program that is too small may be too limiting, but if someone’s priorities are to get a liberal arts education or skiing, but want to study engineering as an intellectual discipline, those programs may be just fine. You seemed concerned about how these programs prepare one to practice the profession. </p>

<p>Also, a lot of practicing engineers don’t do work that is all that complicated, and these schools may be just fine for those positions. In a company I was in a while back, we hired quality assurance (QA) engineers who basically needed enough aptitude to run the product, operate the instrumentation to measure performance, record the results and identify issues. These were not the highest paid positions. I’m sure someone going through any EE degree could have done this job.</p>

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<p>CRD, this hits it on the head. </p>

<p>What I’m trying to wrap my brain around is whether or not there are institutions where one can do both, but not at the expense of significant compromise in the engineering component. </p>

<p>The ability to do a few liberal arts is important, not because he loves English or writing, but because he has a broad intellectual curiosity for its own sake.</p>

<p>Skiing is important, but not if it means the final degree will be functionally worthless. </p>

<p>I can name one institution that would be perfect, Stanford. Their admission though is completely random. Everyone is qualified and there are too many for slots by a long shot. Several years ago a legacy from S’s school got in and a far more qualified candidate, who did get an admit to Harvard and Yale, didn’t. Go figure.</p>

<p>So, at the end of the day, what are the hallmarks of an engineering program that is good enough?</p>

<p>M</p>

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<p>I don’t understand what your objection to Cornell is. That seems like it should be on your perfect list also. They have difficult but not impossible admissions, and I think there is good skiing nearby. It’s not THAT big and it has great resources and ivy league humanities. Another worth checking out is the University of Washington Honors Program. </p>

<p>The other universities I mentioned, like Lehigh, RPI, Rochester, and Tufts are still decent options. Also, I think WPI students can cross-register at Clark or Holy Cross for real humanities classes. </p>

<p>There really are options.</p>

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<p>CRD, no objection to Cornell. He’ll be visiting in a handful of weeks. If there is a knock, it’s that entry level classes can be big, but that’s not a deal breaker.</p>

<p>UW has a good reputation, but is very expensive out of state and doesn’t allow declaration of engineering until sophomore year. They unfortunately don’t offer WUE exchange.</p>

<p>All of the rest mentioned besides U of R will be visited in that same trip.</p>

<p>Dartmouth, on paper, given all of S’s academic and non-academic desires, would seem like a better fit, but their engineering program is tough to get a handle on. I think lots of their grads end up with four year BAs and in the finance field. Five years at Ivy tuition for a BS seems like a bit of a tough nut to crack, particularly in lieu of their decision to not accept any AP credits going forward.</p>

<p>M</p>