I have it narrowed down between two womens’ colleges to have as my number one choice and the one I will apply to ED. I can’t decided if I would rather be in a city or a suburb/ town for college, but was wondering if one was a better choice for science and engineering overall.
The combined Barnard/Columbia program is the clear choice for Engineering between the two. That being said, there are better private schools for engineering (Caltech, MIT, Stanford, CMU) , as well as public ones (Berkeley, Umich, GT, Purdue) which might offer a better experience for you.
We toured Barnard with my D and when she asked about science, they told her about pre-med. She had no interest in pre-med. I wonder how many Barnard students really do the Barnard/Columbia program. It didn’t seem like a great school for anything STEM.
Smith is a better bet is on the list of schools with the highest percentages of their graduates eventually getting a PhD in a STEM field.
Whoops, I checked and it must have fallen out of the top 50 (see table 4 below)
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf13323/
Still it at least HAS engineering.