We don’t know much about his qualifications. Depending on those, he might also be eligible for scholarship on many of the schools discussed in this thread, which are wide ranging in their level of competitiveness.
My son wanted a program with hands on learning that started in major first year. Small per se was not super important to him, but small classes and who taught them was.
He looked at a BUNCH of schools. It became apparent pretty quickly that they weren’t all created equally in terms of facilities.
The schools we all thought were solid were RPI, WPI, Olin, Lehigh, Case, Rose Hulman, Harvey Mudd and Cal Poly. Of those he narrowed based on fit, applied to and was accepted to RPI, WPI, Case and Cal Poly. He agonized until the end of April between WPI and Cal Poly and ended up at the latter.
Those may seem like extremes because Cal Poly has 22k students and WPI only has 4k. In reality though they are quite similar. There are just under 6k students in the college of engineering at CP. The classes are small with Calculus capped at 32 as an example, and all classes including labs and discussions are taught by instructors with PhDs, not grad students. The lab facilities though are unparalleled for undergrads. They have more than 80 labs in the college of engineering alone. Clubs are very robust. Concrete Canoe, the biggest civil club is perennially in the top 5 including three consecutive championships.
So, if you want small, simply for the sake of small, Cal Poly would not be a good option. If you want the advantages of small, with great hands on project based learning, with some of the advantages of a bigger school like great facilities that feels more like a typical college experience, Poly is certainly worth a look.
Good luck!
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I have to laugh since at Michigan my sons Calc class had 25 students… So to the OP… Don’t always think small is smaller. They also have a 15:1 professor /student ratio…
Small school are great but even at larger schools of any size once in engineering you just narrowed that size down. Join a group or two and those 30 students will be the people you hang with and maybe you become friends with like 4/5 and the rest people you associate with. This is a a school of 50,000… This is what typically happens. Having a large school is fun for the sports though… Some like my daughter just like smaller schools in general but don’t assume you will get extra attention etc at a smaller school. That’s on you. But you can approach a professor or T/A at either school. Also most large classes break down to section of less then 30 students to review the material. Just saying…
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Small schools can be less than ideal though. It was really apparent visiting places like Lafayette or reading about programs like Swarthmore, that their facilities are really lacking. That might not be important to everyone, but it was very important to my son.
Also, not to pick on Michigan, but the ratio is faculty:student, not professor:student. Graduate teaching assistants are considered faculty so those statistics are not very meaningful. Take Purdue for example. According to USNWR, they have the highest percentage of TA taught classes in the nation at 26%, but their faculty:student ratio is 13:1.
Just a note that TAs don’t teach any of the engineering courses at Purdue. Its 100% professors. TAs will lead recitations but never lectures.
It’s the humanities than can have TAs as the main faculty.
From what I can tell, having a TA as a primary instructor occurs mostly in frosh English composition and beginning foreign language (and some schools do it for frosh level math).
However, some schools also use considerable numbers of adjunct faculty for ordinary courses (as opposed to specialty topics where an industry viewpoint is desired).
My son never had a TA teach a class they teach the break out groups as stated by @momofboiler1.
Michigan has 55 %classes with 20 students wtc5. My point is sometimes students assume smaller school means smaller classes and more attention. Again, that is simply not true to a degree and it’s up to the student what type of relationship they have with any professor.
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I don’t know of any school where engineering lectures are taught by TAs. Labs and recitations/discussions/breakouts though are included in calculating faculty:student ratios. At nearly all large research schools, Michigan and Purdue not withstanding, those are taught by graduate assistants. That’s why that metric is so misleading.
The engineering labs and discussions at Cal Poly are taught by the same instructors that teach the lectures. They all have PhDs. They don’t use graduate assistants, because they don’t have them.
When did you visit Lafayette and found the facilities lacking?
My comments were really for the OP and those reading since many think that the big university don’t have enough personal attention or ability to get to know the professor or build a relationship etc. My son knew his professors and they knew him as well as my daughter did and her school was under 2,000 students. That’s what I meant by its up to the student. Having T/A also is not that bad. They can give a different perspective to the class material. Sometimes that is actually an advantage. Not all professors are great teachers per se no matter how talented they are and vice versa… Lol…
Not saying one is better then the other. Just giving a different perspective.
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- Once you’ve set foot on campuses that have deeper and broader resources, the differences become very obvious.
I have and I know what you’re saying. The fact is that no student - especially an undergrad - is going to use all those facilities.
I asked when you visited Lafayette because Lafayette opened a new state-of-the-art integrated sciences and engineering center just a year and a half ago. It was the largest capitol project in school history.
Sometimes timing is everything. In another thread recently, a poster commented on how run down and out of date the engineering facilities seemed on his visit to Rutgers, another Big Ten school fitting the category of the type large major research university you’ve been talking about.
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@Bill_Marsh Agree, after visiting in March, Lafayette is staying on my son’s list due to their new integrated science center. We did not find the facilities lacking in any way. Lafayette can’t compare to a Michigan, Purdue, or Cal Poly, but impressed us for a small college.
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Cal Poly doesn’t have a PhD program. The 80+ labs in the College of Engineering are exclusively there for undergrads. Plus there’s Bonderson and The Hangar that are both there solely to support student clubs and side projects.
The trick isn’t who has the toys, but as you alluded to, who gets to use them.
As for the new building at Lafayette, I agree, I haven’t seen it. I’m sure it’s impressive. My suspicion though, and I could be wrong, is that every engineering facility at Lafayette could fit into the Aerospace building at CP. 
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Who gets to use the toys is an important consideration.
We visited a school that had just built the most amazing chem e building with incredible labs. D toured, got excited, only to learn that undergrads were only using the old facility with no plan to transition them. She heard the message loud and clear that research was fir grad students only. Needless to say, that school got the axe.
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Undergraduate education is about learning the fundamentals. The facilities are there to accomplish that task.
Cal Poly SLO has 10 times the undergrad enrollment of Lafayette and in the most recent pre-Covid graduation awarded 10 times as many engineering degrees as Lafayette did. So, to have the facilities needed to accomplish the task, of course the facilities at Cal Poly are going to dwarf those at Lafayette. But that’s not a reflection of quality, rather it’s about scale.
At the large state research universities discussed earlier, they have a dual mission. The first is to educate their students and the second is to serve as a think tank to do research for the state’s major constituencies. The facilities needed for undergraduate education are still only going to be what is needed to accomplish the task of teaching fundamentals.
What’s impressive about the facilities at those large research universities is what’s needed to accomplish their mission as a think tank. But that research is accomplished by professors and PhD students, not by undergrads. The same is true at private research universities like the Ivies+. Instead of doing research for state priorities, they tend to get grants for national priorities.
But plenty of undergrads still get to utilize those facilities and work with those professors and PhD students.
All research universities work on national priorities. The overwhelming majority of research funding comes from federal sources. Look at Purdue, for example. There is very little aerospace in Indiana, yet they are a top notch aerospace research school. Universities often target a decent amount of their research expertise toward things that make an impact locally, but generally the research base at these schools is very broad.
You can learn (and reinforce) an awful lot of the fundamentals in a research lab.
As one of said professors, I can tell you that many of us hire undergrads to work in our lab. I often have about twice as many undergrads in my lab as grad students.
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All one has to do is look at the list of facilities to know this statement is patently false. Cal Poly has much more breadth. Does Lafayette have a Rotational Dynamics lab? A Vibrations Lab? A Mach plus wind tunnel? Did Lafayette invent the CubeSat and have the lab that manufactures launchers and coordinates launches? Cal Poly has more than 80 distinctly separate engineering lab spaces, with no redundancy, save for fluids labs in both the AE and ME departments.