Rowan vs. Stevens Engineering

College Search & Selection
1

My son has has been accepted into the engineering programs of 5 different colleges. In a separate post, I asked for readers’ comments about 3 of the colleges. Here, I would like to get feedback for the other 2 colleges: Rowan U vs. Stevens Institute. The annual net cost of attendance (tuition and fees, plus room and board after scholarships and grants) for Rowan is about $12.5K and for Stevens is about $22.5K. We are looking at university ranking, both at university level and STEM level, faculty to student ratio, research opportunities, prestige, intern/co-op, job placement services, competitiveness in securing jobs, average pay for graduates, and net cost to attend. Having done our research, it appears that Stevens comes up tops for every single one except for cost (in our case, a $10K difference between the 2 colleges). Spending an additional $40K over 4 years is a lot money and we have another child going to college in a couple of years. And he is also accepted into Rowan’s Honors College. We do not want to pick the cheaper one and kick ourselves later because Stevens is the better choice or pick Stevens and then it turns out that the additional $40K is not worth the marginal difference in quality. We have heard a lot of good things about Rowan’s engineering school and its brand new facilities (labs, housing, downtown) and that it is up and coming. On the other hand, Steven’s is the established school with wide brand recognition for their school.

I would like to hear comments on which one you think should be the 1st choice, and the factors you considered to arrive at that choice. Thank you!

2

Here are some things about re: Stevens:

  1. What is the min GPA to keep the scholarship? Engineering GPA’s tend do be lower than in other disciplines.Stevens is quite expensive without scholarship while Rowan is still the instate tuition if the GPA falls below for the minimum for scholarship. To me, this would be something to really think about.
  2. Housing - a friend of ours was saying that university housing after freshmen year gets more expensive at Stevens, and so their kid and friends got an apartment nearby.
  3. Stevens is in Hoboken and so maybe more opportunities for coops etc in the NYC area?
  4. Stevens is well known and respected within this region and a bit outside, but not as nationally recognized as Rutgers and perhaps NJIT.
  5. Stevens has a large alumni network and I think their career center may have more resources as well - something to check out at both places.

Rowan is a well respected undergrad engineering school. I know only faculty there but not anyone who attended their engineering program. Perhaps someone else may be able to give a better view of pluses and minuses of Rowan Engineering.

3

ABET Accredited Engineering programs are going to have similar curriculum

The choice shoudl be about price, location, graduates getting jobs, housing, etc…

4

Someone asked a similar question about Rowan against TCNJ. Go to the Rowan engineering page-there’s a link to the stats of their graduates.

Honors College gets you big perks at Rowan - he will be all but guaranteed of getting any Class he wants, when he wants it. He will register before everyone else. He also gets priority housing selection - and on campus housing is awesome! My son is moving off campus next year and our housing cost will go down by more than 50%, so your cost of attendance can go down significantly if he moves off campus junior year.

I know 1 recent Rowan engineering grad who got a large scholarship as he was a top high school student. It wasn’t a cake walk. He had to work to keep grades up, but he had good internships and had a job secured before graduating starting at $76k.

5

My D is a freshman in Rowan Engineering and honors. She chose due to costs, which are right around what the OP’s will be. Over spring break I overheard my D tell someone that Rowan was her last choice when she was applying to colleges but now she knows she made the right choice.

@momprof9904 's first point is important. I know that if my D ever lost her scholarship at Rowan, it would could manage without it seriously impacting our younger kids or our retirement. That would not be the case if she were at a private school. That is a huge stress reliever.

The other thing is that a student only needs to keep a 3.0 to keep the scholarship in the engineering college, and that is evaluated annually according to what I read on the website. So if a student has a bad fall semester, they have the spring semester to bring it up without having to do anything special. If it’s lower than 3.0 at the end of the year, appeals for more time to bring it up can be made, according to some students I asked.

A student can change to any field within engineering with a 3.5, I think. The gpa requirement for honors is also 3.5, and it seems like students stay in according to the students I spoke with before D started.

I also asked a lot of students I met during honors orientation about students who lost scholarships and they said they rarely have heard about that happening. A professor in an engineering presentation for admitted students also said something along those lines, like honors engineering students tend to keep good gpa’s. So it’s not a cut throat, weed out environment.

My D has some really exciting leadershop opportunities coming up next year. It probably helped that she was in honors in getting those positions.

She has found really great friends in honors. I once chatted with a Rowan engineering student who was back visiting my D’s high school. She said one thing that shows in the Rowan honors students is that they are very down to earth. There are some very high stat kids in honors who could have gone to much more prestigious colleges but chose Rowan for very practical reasons. That says something about the people there.

The housing is very nice. Honors housing is pricey, though.

My D had a period of stress in her first semester. She wasn’t crazy about that first engineering clinic and wondered if she was in the right major. She also had an adjustment to communal living. But once she got through that she has been surprisingly stress free, even during exams. It just seems like if students do their work and manage their time, it’s not overly stressful…at least for the first three semesters. Then it’s supposed to get more challenging.

The professors have been very approachable and willing to help. She can just stop by their offices to talk if she has questions about anything.

I don’t know a ton about job prospects and salaries, except what I’ve seen on the website. Rowan has engineering clinics where companies/organizations bring in problems or projects for teams of students to work on. They are also just starting a coop program.

There are job fairs that even freshman attend to network, and my D gets emails all the time about research opportunities.

6

Would spending the extra $40k require you to impose a smaller price limit on the next kid’s college costs, or take out parent loans, or cause you not to be able to save for retirement?

7

One scholarship needs min GPA of 3.2
The other needs min GPA of 2.0

8

We can afford the $40K but it will have a big financial impact

9

I really dislike reading these threads in CC that begin with “School X vs. School Y vs. School Z”, but, in general, if Stevens’ financial aid/scholarship offer makes it feasible to attend as opposed to Rowan or another public school, the first choice really is Stevens. Stevens is a long established - 147 years - research university. Both Stevens and Rowan are excellent schools and your student will have no trouble getting an engineering job when he/she graduates, but arguably, there will be more opportunities available at Stevens. Stevens has an excellent co-op and internship program, and very strong connections to technological industries, government agencies, and in particular the financial and investment banking industry. Rowan is new to engineering - 15 years or so. It takes time for any school to establish a track record in engineering - even MIT, Cooper Union, RPI, CMU, et al as well as Stevens were new and unknown at one time. There is more than just a marginal difference in quality between a typical state university such as Rowan and Stevens. The average student at Stevens has some 100-150 points higher SAT scores, three quarters of the students come from the top 10% of their high school classes, and many have been National Merit Scholars. It is a benefit to your student to be surrounded by that level of academic talent. Additionally, having a major industrial and government sponsored research program, there are many more opportunities for undergraduate research. There have been quite a few startup companies founded by Stevens students and faculty. I know of two students who, as sophomore engineering students at Stevens, had an internship with the company that built the robotic arm for the Mars Rover. The interns designed a major portion of that piece of equipment - imagine putting on your resume that you designed hardware that flew to Mars. I suspect that type of opportunity would be less common at Rowan for example.

I know that some readers of CC decry surveys such as Payscale (I take them with more than just a grain of salt myself), but other things being equal, Payscale puts Stevens as seventh of all engineering schools in America for starting and mid-career salaries (also, 15th of all universities across all majors in the United States on their overall survey):

https://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/best-schools-by-type/bachelors/engineering-schools

I have several friends whose children attended Stevens, and we have many Stevens alumni in our company. They found great success in having attended there, and the Stevens graduates we have are superior problem solvers and extremely capable.

Congratulations on your son/daughter having such a great set of choices. Rowan and Stevens are both great schools and he/she will not go wrong with either one.

10

For what it is worth, I think Rowan is on an upward trajectory. Like when TCNJ went from Trenton State and being a teachers college to being one of the top public colleges in NJ. So I think a Rowan degree will be worth even more in the future.

11

A rant: skip if you are not in the mood and would prefer a good PC post. This isn’t it:

Agree with @Parent0347 specifically & in general. Many CC posts laud the GPA benefits of attending a school where a student’s credential are at the high end of the distribution. Others claim that because engineer curricula are standardized across schools, students should choose the least expensive alternative. {by the way, people argue the same for students headed for medical school-ugh}. They suggest it’s better to attend a less well known school (a euphemism for a less selective one) to achieve the highest GPA possible. Poppycock.

General advice can impact entire cohorts of kids. Thus it is worth also considering what is best for society in the long run. The “nab the 4.0 at Regional X cause it’s all the same” perspective is short sighted.

Alternative perspective: Let’s work towards developing the most educated population possible. Let’s have well trained engineers and educated physicians. Yes that can happen for students attending a local school where one student can sit comfortably on top of the GPA/SAT distribution. But it is more likely in places where they don’t. And we can’t have an educated society if too many students adopt the GPA as the goal. Most of those hiring engineers agree.

The on paper curriculum may be standardized but the education isn’t. Schools differ on level of instruction, depth/breadth of understanding, and expectations do. Those educated at CMU, CalTech, MIT, GeorgiaTech do end up different than most at regional/directive school. And that is related to the fact that they also start out so.

Even if schools use similar textbooks for similar sounding courses, those are simply jumping off points that obscure genuine differences across schools. For example, the pace of instruction across schools differ such that material in an intro textbook will be mastered much earlier in the semester at the stronger school. That allows the class to move on to more complex material. The challenges in class and outside class will be greater when the school is filled with strongly motived students; one that was selected by students knowing they’d be challenged vs one where the top students chose it so they’d have a chill experience. More importantly, a strong student body creates a different learning environment than a weak one. Strong students have a positive synergistic impact on each other. That happens in the classroom but, and perhaps more importantly, it happens outside the classroom, on weekends, evenings and during breaks (and after graduation). It happens in hackathons, competitions, and while hanging out in the dorms.

Yes the resulting GPA might be lower. And the stressors are likely greater at the stronger schools. So I’m not advocating that all students choose Georgia Tech, CMU or Stevens over regional schools better known for having a good liberal arts program. But as a general sentiment, I think we should all hope our society strives to support students becoming as educated as possible. We need better mouse traps. While these issues may not be the most central for a particular student, they are important overall. Let’s put the strongest students in the schools that will challenge them most. (It’s not about the school’s name). I’d rather go to a physician who earned average grades at CMU as an undergrad than one who graduated top of the class from North Central Alabama, West.

Not a “dis” of regional, state schools. Some are outstanding. But few are expressly designed to educate engineers. In terms of loans, I rarely endorse taking them. And would advice against them if there was any chance a student would end up majoring in other topics (less likely for students in institutes). But in engineering, the ROI of an extra 40K, if put into attending the better engineering school, will be large enough that payback will happen quickly. Students with degrees in most areas of engineering from top schools are being offered starting salaries at 100K and up.

12

However, the mix of majors at what Payscale considers “engineering schools” varies considerably among the different schools, so this ranking is heavily influenced by the mix of majors (e.g. more engineering majors results in a higher pay average, while other STEM majors, particularly biology, tend to have lower pay).

Stevens’ own career survey results by major are here:
https://www.stevens.edu/sites/stevens_edu/files/files/Career/Class-of-2018-Outcomes-Report-Web2.pdf
https://www.stevens.edu/directory/stevens-career-center/recruiting-stevens-students/salary-information

13

Will the “big financial impact” limit funding for the next kid’s college, or your own retirement?

14

According to Prepscholar, the average SAT for Stevens admitted students is 1385. Rowan engineering in general, according to their website has an admitted students SAT or 1270, but mechanical engineering is 1350 and honors students have an average SAT of 1370. Engineering students are heavily represented in honors. I don’t think those numbers are all that different from Stevens.

15

I attended an small instate public for engineering undergrad and an “elite” private for grad school. Quality of education at the small public with the actual professors teaching the class instead of graduate assistants was far better than the “elite” private. I attended “elite” private with students caught up in going to an “elite” private. We ended up as interns and residents with people who attended public and private schools All making the same money. discernible difference in ability. The very few studies and surveys on this public versus private issue show that it doesn’t matter where you go ultimately. If your kid is driven and a good student they will be successful no matter where they go. This is especially true in the engineering fields. I had terrible professors in graduate school who never actually taught the class. My elite medical degree did not translate into a better opportunity than my colleagues who went to state public universities. You may think an elite school name may impress some people and may get your resume an initial look, but believe me no one with any sense who is hiring Will hire an Ivy League engineering graduate with a 3.0 average over an NJIT graduate with a 3.5.