Rowan, Stevens, TCNJ, Rutgers engineering and other schools

We live in NJ. Our son will be a senior next year and intends on majoring in engineering. He has a 4.0 gpa, great extra curricular and sports and 1490 SAT. We have visited a number of northeast schools including all of the NJ engineering schools except Princeton thus far. We find that many of schools have positive and negative aspects. We visited Stevens this past weekend and although it offers good career services we were not impressed with its housing and facilities and the Hoboken area especially at over $70000 a year. After finding this site and reading some comments I see that many share similar opinions on Rutgers, TCNJ, Rowan, as well as Lehigh, Lafayette and U Delaware, in terms of quality of curriculum, campus and housing and graduate outcomes and of course cost. My son will apply to maybe 8-9 schools and make a decision after seeing where he gets in and what the net prices are. What we are interested in getting more feedback on from others on this site is Rowan University. We approached the visit to Rowan as a possible safety school. After visiting and sitting through the presentation we left with a much different view. The presentation was more comprehensive in terms of engineering curriculum, graduate outcomes etc than any other school we visited. It didn’t come across as a canned sell. The new facilities and dormitory were the most impressive of any school we visited. Some of the other schools like Lehigh and Stevens have vaunted reputations and were my sons top choices at one point. Were we missing something about Rowan? We walked away thinking that Rowan’s total package was so impressive it couldn’t be considered a safety option. Can anyone provide more feedback?

If you search this site you will find many debates on this topic. For the price, my personal opinion is Rowan can’t be beat. There was a thread somewhere on here where someone commented their kid with very good stats wasn’t accepted to the engineering major at Rowan but was accepted at several other schools like UDel and Lehigh. Rowan has invested a ton and their engineering programs are well regarded. They are generous with aid, especially for highly qualified engineering majors.

Thank you. We visited not knowing or expecting much and left wondering if Rowan shouldn’t be much higher up the list. The engineering center and labs and freshman dormitory seemed clearly a cut above the more expensive schools we visited. The information sessions were packed. We went to the mechanical and electrical department presentations. The professors at least on first impression were very engaging. We spoke to other visitors who had visited some of the same schools we did. The overall impression conveyed by the presenters was that something special is being developed and built at Rowan and the professors actually seemed like they were truly excited and engaged. It was just a different impression than some of the other schools we visited.

Rowan University was featured in a recent episode of the podcast “Freakonomics” as a university that offers great value for its student body.

Henry Rowan, an MIT engineering grad, built induction furnaces used globally, His $100 million gift to Glassboro State in 1992 was the largest in the history of public education. It was a game-changer, especially here in NJ, Noted author Malcolm Gladwell recently did a podcast about it. It’s worth a listen.

Mr. Rowan noted complacency in NJ, especially in engineering programs in an increasingly technical world. He wanted to stop the brain drain out of NJ. His gift has had every other NJ college to step up their games.

My son was a Top 3-4 student in HS with 1400+ GPAs. Three of his classmates went to Harvard. My son chose Rowan over Cornell, Virginia Tech, Penn State, Lehigh, and others. Got tuition and housing for four years, provided that he maintained a 3.0+ GPA (he did). Came in real handy when he started in 2009, at the height of the Great Recession. Graduated with a Civil Engineering degree in four years (try that at Rutgers), had a job the summer after junior year working with a NC CE firm and the Army Corps of Engineers on the Atlantic City beach replenishment just before Sandy. Accepted a position with a leading firm in North Jersey, which he started the week after graduation. He’s worked with engineers from Cornell, Lafayette, Lehigh, NC State and NC Wilmington, Maryland, Drexel, and many others. Doesn’t feel he’s taken a back seat to anyone and felt better prepared than most. 100% of his Rowan Engineering 2013 classmates had jobs in their chosen field or grad school upon graduation. It doesn’t get better as a parent.

My son was a pretty good soccer player and had scholarship opportunities at Cornell, SUNY-Binghamton and Cortland, and others. I remember taking him to an informal visit where he could meet some students and professors, eat the food, sit in on a class. After one class, outside a lab, he met a couple engineering students who were on the soccer team. A professor, Dr. Mehta, overheard us talking about the feasibility of playing soccer while trying to complete a degree in four years (engineering curricula is pretty well set, it’s demanding, and it’s not the kind of major where “remote learning” works on varsity road trips). Mehta got into my son’s face, looked him dead in his eyes, and asked, “Do you want to be an Engineer or a Soccer Player?” My son blushed, but Dr. Mehta made an impression. My son instead played club soccer (intercollegiate, mostly against TCNJ and Philly colleges) and got involved in many intramurals (volleyball, softball, dodgeball, flag football. Won a coed Field Day, which was a Big Deal). Never in his room. If not in the lab or library or Student Center, he was at the Rec Center or intramural fields. He had a great college experience.

Check out the post called “Why Rowan?”. I first posted my reply in 2011 and updated, I think, in 2015. From what I’ve heard and seen (I visit regularly in my work), it’s only gotten better. The main points are that Rowan is a club school more than not frat school, it’s a place to Do more than a place to Watch others do (such as a big football or basketball game). Some people need the Big Game college experience. Rowan students, if they want to see a big game, will go to Rutgers or Philly or NYC or the Meadowlands for that.

Your son and you will decide which feels best, where he wants to fit in. But Rowan should be your benchmark school. Engagement by professors, small class sizes, hands-on learning, quality of education and facilities, growing regional/national reputation, it’s there. Your son will be challenged, he won’t be slummin’. For engineering, only Stevens, based on reputation, is close. And I’m guessing he’ll get some generous merit aid.

Good luck!

My son had similar stats. We’re from Oregon and he considered adding Rowan to his list based on all you’ve learned. In the end, he didn’t, because he focussed on schools in the west. He ended up at Cal Poly, but a similarly overlooked school, Utah, made his top three and wasn’t ruled out until two days before the deadline. A perfect safety school should be so enticing that it competes for the top spot. He’d be well served by choosing Rowan. Good luck!

P.S. You could cut and paste your post into the engineering forum. There are lots of knowledgable posters there.

Stevens is the best in NJ and offers the best career services, placement, and student outcomes in the state. Stevens graduates are the sixteenth highest paid in the United States (Bloomberg Business Week/Payscale survey “What’s Your College Degree Worth, 2017”). It is the most selective school in the state (with the exception of Princeton University), has the highest qualified students (average 1380 SAT, average high school GPA 3.8, with only that exception), and the most rigorous and in-depth curriculum (145 credits for engineering). Stevens’ co-op and internship program is the best in the northeast, the location right across the river from the financial and business capital of the world enables its strong ties and placement in major corporations for internships and placement of the graduates. The only advantage to Rowan is cost, even then, the regard of the graduates by industry and the student outcomes are by no means comparable. You seriously are comparing a 145 year old doctoral research university, one of the first engineering schools in the United States, to a school that has offered engineering only for the last 15 years or so, and only to the master’s level at that?

Hi, I happened to see this as I was scrolling through my news feed on linkedin and actually made an account so I could reply to you!
I graduated from Rowan as a chemical engineer in 2016. I minored in German, specialized in biological engineering, and was part of the honors concentration (Bantivoglio Honors Concentration).
When I was looking for schools in 2011-12, I looked at the same schools your son is looking at and had similar extracurriculars, etc. Right before the deadline to choose I was stuck between Stevens and Rowan. Stevens was my longtime dream school. My dad went there. Rowan was my safety school. I didn’t even know it existed until my dad said hey you should apply here. I visited Rowan on a nice warm Spring day. That may have contributed to my initial enthusiasm for the school. Although, more than just the tour attracted me. I was accepted into the honors concentration which gives you preference over other students, allows you to pick classes early, preferred housing, extra volunteer, internship, scholarship opportunities, etc. just for taking a few “harder” classes that fit right into your engineering curriculum/schedule. On top of that, the price really attracted me. The labs seemed 100 years newer than those at Stevens. The buildings all seemed brand new (now there is a 2nd engineering building at rowan that is in fact brand new).
After visiting Stevens and Rowan week after week trying to figure out why Rowan popped up as my favorite school, I finally chose Rowan.
My experience there was fantastic. I studied abroad during the summer after my freshmen year which contributed to my minor and was aided by the honors concentration (you just need to fill out a form for financial aid for study abroad, research opportunities and a few other opportunities). After my sophomore year, I had an internship with a small pharmaceutical company. At this point, internships were very much about who you know and how many you applied to. The more you applied to, the higher your chance of getting something. Yes, maybe it would have been easier if I went to Stevens… But in the end, everyone who put in the effort to apply for internships (from Rowan) got one. My sophomore internship put me in place for another internship after my junior year with the Linde Group. This internship helped me finally secure my current job with Linde straight out of college.

Going to Rowan was the best choice I ever made. I wouldn’t have been happy at Stevens or any of the other schools I applied to (NJIT, Drexler, RPI, Lehigh, Lafayette). Many Rowan students say the same thing. Rowan was their safety school but it’s what they chose in the end because of the feeling they got there and no one regretted it.
It’s all about the effort that you put in, not the school you choose. I firmly believe that.
Now, Rowan has the new business building, new engineering building, new freshmen housing. They’re building more and more living spaces and retail spaces. Their sports programs are expending as their goal is to become D1 eventually. It’s a great time to go to Rowan.
I hope this reply helps you a bit!!

@engineer80, some of the best engineering programs in the nation do not have doctoral programs. Cal Poly, Harvey Mudd, Rose Hulman, Olin and the military academies seem to produce pretty solid engineers.

Now let’s talk cost. The opportunity cost for choosing to spend $33,000 more for Stevens than Rowan is over $1.3M. If the OP chooses Stevens, they’d have to make that much MORE just to break even. Cost should not be trivialized.

Thank you for the response. I guess I should clarify that we thought of Rowan as a safety prior to visiting. Their engineering programs are difficult to get admitted now every bit as selective as more well known schools. We were advised that admissions criteria is now highest it’s been in the history of the program as it’s profile has risen in the northeast and now nationally. NJIT is the real safety on my son’s list now. It’s nice to get feedback from someone with personal knowledge of Rowan. Many in our visiting group spoke of visiting Stevens and how after visiting Rowan, they felt that it was a strong alternative to Stevens, Lehigh and bucknell at less than half the price. It’s almost like a secret has gotten out. Thanks again

I like what Rowan is doing, and there is no question that Rowan should be a serious contender for any NJ resident that wants an undergraduate engineering degree. But realistically, it is not “every bit as selective” as schools like Stevens or Lehigh. For example, the current ASEE online profiles (for engineering programs specifically) have the following numbers:

Engineering college acceptance rate: 76% Rowan, 38% Stevens, 26% Lehigh
Engineering college Math SAT 25-75% range: 620-690 Rowan, 660-740 Stevens, 660-760 Lehigh

http://profiles.asee.org/profiles/7353/screen/19?school_name=Rowan+University
http://profiles.asee.org/profiles/7389/screen/19?school_name=Stevens+Institute+of+Technology
http://profiles.asee.org/profiles/7230/screen/19?school_name=Lehigh+University

This does not mean that Stevens or Lehigh is automatically a better choice; there could be excellent reasons to go with Rowan instead. But “equal selectivity” is not one of those reasons.

Rowan is indeed a “strong alternative” – if you are an NJ resident and qualify for in-state tuition. But if you have to pay the out-of-state tuition rate, then the value proposition is quite different. In that case, Rowan is not going to be “less than half the price” of private schools like Stevens, Lehigh, and Bucknell, which have large endowments and give out lots of financial aid. On the contrary, Rowan could easily be more expensive.

So one downside to Rowan is that it has not developed into a compelling alternative for people outside of NJ. For example, according to College Navigator, Rowan has 3% out-of-state enrollment, while Stevens has 42% and Lehigh has 77%. A school like Stevens or Lehigh can attract strong applicants from around the country, and even internationally; Rowan’s appeal is basically restricted to NJ. This may make it difficult for Rowan to fully catch up.

@eyemgh - Even at the higher tuition of Stevens (you can’t expect a private university to have the same tuition as a public one, but that said, most Stevens students are not paying the “sticker price” of tuition, and receive significant financial aid) Stevens is a far better value. On Payscale’s survey, Stevens graduates are 16th in the nation for starting salary and ROI on their tuition. Where do you come up with a “1.3 M opportunity cost”? Despite the higher tuition, Stevens can still turn away nearly two thirds of its applicants and has no trouble attracting highly qualified students. Rowan accepts more than three fourths of its applicants for example. Rowan is certainly an adequate (as all ABET accredited engineering schools are) up and coming school, but comparisons to Stevens, RPI, Lehigh, etc. are ludicrous, really. Stevens alumni are Fortune 500 CEOs (and founders of F500 companies - GM and Texas Instruments for example), professors at major universities, government officials (a former head of NASA’s manned spaceflight comes to mind for example), Nobel laureates, and many more. Rowan is a newcomer with a long way to go in the engineering realm so for most applicants it is really a regional safety school. Why would you choose Rowan over say Rutgers, which has far better global reach, name recognition, and alumni if you are looking for “cheap” in-state tuition (actually, New Jersey’s public universities aren’t exactly inexpensive by national standards). And yes, Rowan and all the other New Jersey public institutions are good values only for New Jersey residents. Paying the out-of-state rate to attend them - which makes them almost as expensive as Stevens or RPI for example- is crazy. By the way, did you get accepted to Stevens? I wish you luck at Rowan.

@njdatajets - Rowan is far less selective than Stevens and Lehigh- see the previous posts.

One other consideration - when you compare to Rutgers, assume your son will be admitted to the honors college. It may not make a difference - particularly to price -, but you probably want to compare apples to apples.

Respectfully disagree that it’s ludicrous to compare Stevens with Rowan. There are subjective factors of course but of the schools we visited we were most overall impressed by Rowan, U of Delaware, and the College of NJ in the state/public category. Among the expensive privates, the top two that stood out to us were Rensselaer and Worcester Polytechnic (although my son would rather not go that far). We also visited Olin College but were turned off by a VERY overt political/social vibe. Lehigh was ok. Stevens was a disappointment

Another potential downside: Rowan’s institutional reputation reflects all of its programs, not just engineering. Engineering enrollment is less than 10% of the total. And Rowan’s non-engineering programs are not nearly as strong.

It’s common for the school of engineering at a given university to have higher stats than, say, the school of business or the school of arts & sciences. So for example, the overall Math SAT scores at a school like Stevens or Lehigh would be lower than the Math SATs for the college of engineering specifically (listed above). But not by very much – a school like Stevens or Lehigh is still quite selective, even for business or arts & sciences.

At Rowan, engineering is relatively selective, but most other majors aren’t. So the stats for the school as a whole are much lower than those for engineering specifically.

I’m not trying to diss Rowan here; as I stated before: “there is no question that Rowan should be a serious contender for any NJ resident that wants an undergraduate engineering degree.” But there are qualifications in that statement: if you’re not a NJ resident, or if you want to major in something other than engineering, then the case for Rowan may be a lot weaker.

@njdadjets - you didn’t mention finances. If your son falls in love with Lehigh, is price a major issue?

As someone who lived within 10 mins of Rowan for years and attended parties at Glassboro State, the changes at Rowan are significant. It’s a good school, and I know a lot of folks who really like it. A friend from PA is sending his daughter there in the fall, because even out of state tuition it remained a good value for them.

Regarding the comments above…we really like Olin as a family, but it is very small and the admissions process seemed like it would add unreasonable amounts of stress to an already crazy process (college applications).

Price is an issue. The net price of the privates without loans has to be in the 30-35 range to even consider

I understand all the potential benefits of the private schools but at what cost? The statistical outcomes of engineering graduates for jobs and grad school and average salary at state schools Rowan, Udel, TCNJ are as good as the privates. I don’t want to hinder my son on cost, but I’m finding it really hard to conclude that the added cost of a private school is worth it. That’s why I’m on here, to get some differing views

@nydadjets- The average net cost of Stevens students is half of the catalog tuition. For qualified students, many receive sufficient financial aid to make the actual cost comparable to 30-40k a year. Additionally, if you look at Payscale’s survey of engineering schools, Stevens comes in at first in the northeast in starting engineering salaries (that survey removes the influence of non-engineering majors from the statistics, so that is a true apples to apples comparison). Rowan isn’t even on the top 10 of that list. Ask some engineering hiring managers who they would prefer in terms of graduates. I can tell you from personal experience that the professional world places enormous esteem on Stevens graduates. You simply have opportunities there that you won’t elsewhere. Additionally, the acceptance rate for Rowan engineering is 75%, the ASEE stats are for the engineering school specifically. All that said I wish you the best wherever you attend.