I don’t know about the others but I do know Vanderbilt does not allow coops. Our D visited ther and during info session they said they did not support coops and felt it was important for students to graduate in 4 years. Since she wanted a coop she never even bothered to tour the campus.
CSU Sacramento’s mechanical engineering department has a table that may be relevant to this discussion:
http://www.ecs.csus.edu/me/Enrollment%20and%20Graduation%20Data/Degrees%20Conferred%20Data.pdf
For 2012-2013, the median years to a bachelor’s degree for frosh admits was 5.8 in mechanical engineering, 5.5 in the engineering division, and 4.8 in the school overall. For junior transfers, the numbers were 2.8 in mechanical engineering, 3.3 in the engineering division, and 2.3 in the school overall.
Yes, it does look odd that the median (as opposed to the mean) can end in .8, though it may be due to how summer sessions are counted (e.g. it could be that 5.8 = 11 regular semesters with one summer session thrown in).
It does look like students take a substantially larger number of credit units than the number nominally required. Median units to degree in 2012-2013 were 158.0 in mechanical engineering, 159.0 in the engineering division, and 135.5 in the school overall. The normal minimum number of credit units to graduate from CSU Sacramento generally is 120, but mechanical engineering requires 122, according to http://www.ecs.csus.edu/me/docs/curriculum%20roadmap.pdf .
if someone does a combined bachelor/masters degree that takes 5 years and awards both diplomas at the end of year 5, I assume they do not count as a 4 year graduate?
“I went to the “all colleges” list on the Kiplinger’s “best values” site, click-sorted on column 6, then looked down from the top for colleges that seem to have solid engineering programs yet high graduation rates (>= 80%)”
Flawed logic without considering the percentage of students enrolled in engineering vs the rest of the university. As I stated earlier, at Duke only 11 percent of students are in an engineering major. At Michigan, it’s over 20%.
“128 semester hours provided above for UMich engineering is still only 16 hours/semester.”
It’s still 8 credit hours more than liberal arts majors. It still takes more credits to graduate with a degree in engineering than most other disciplines.
“Michigan … 76% … 16%”
Over 20% of undergraduates at Michigan are engineering majors. I noticed Kiplinger’s got Princeton’s percentages correct, but completely screwed up on Michigan’s. So much for accuracy. I have to wonder what else they screwed up on with these figures?
Enrollment figures from winter semester 2015:
http://www.ro.umich.edu/report/15wn105.pdf
27,047 undergraduate students enrolled, including 5,709 of them in the College of engineering.
Michigan has 21.1% of its undergraduate student body enrolled in engineering. That 16% figure is not even close to being accurate. Both Princeton and Michigan have comparable percentages of students enrolled in undergraduate engineering. Here is an example where you can see that the quality of the student body in a comparable discipline is a bit higher at Princeton, which of course comes as no surpise.
So your point @rjkofnovi is that an additional 8 hours of credit requires a full year of time in school?
One thing that probably occurs more often with engineering students is failing a class which is required to take another class. Engineering courses are not only very rigorous but also very sequential. If a student fails a physics class that is required to take thermodynamics and thermo 1 is only offered in the fall it can put you at least a semester and possibly a year behind. There can be kind of a domino effect.
“So your point @rjkofnovi is that an additional 8 hours of credit requires a full year of time in school?”
No. My point is it might take an additional quarter or semester of schooling to complete a degree in engineering. That being the case, the student would not graduate within four years and subsequently make the school look a bit weaker. Strong schools that have large engineering programs, way more times than not, will have lower four year graduation rates than those other strong schools who don’t. Look at the listing provided in post #35. Notice that even MIT and Caltech have lower 4 year graduation rates than their peer schools who typically have a much lower percentage of students studying in the discipline.
@Ivvcsf
Very good point, although in my experience, it is the dropping of an Engineering (or high level math course) course or two, usually to protect your GPA, can push you into an extra semester or two if you are not careful (per the reasons you indicated above). This is also true of other professional disciplines such as Nursing. Dropping Anatomy and Physiology I or II or being unable to register for the class can easily add one year or more to a BSN program.
FYI
percent of grads who are engineering, difference between 4-year and 6-year grad rate, SAT midpoint CR and Math
source: IPEDS
43% 11 1545 California Institute of Technology
0% 5 1515 University of Chicago
4% 10 1505 Harvard University
20% 9 1505 Princeton University
44% 9 1500 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
5% 8 1500 Yale University
16% 6 1490 Vanderbilt University
16% 6 1485 Washington University in St Louis
16% 7 1480 Columbia University in the City of New York
41% 5 1480 Harvey Mudd College
16% 20 1475 Stanford University
15% 8 1470 Northwestern University
0% 3 1460 Pomona College
23% 12 1460 Rice University
9% 8 1455 Dartmouth College
16% 7 1455 Duke University
10% 8 1450 University of Pennsylvania
12% 5 1445 Tufts University
0% 5 1445 Williams College
0% 7 1440 Amherst College
6% 4 1440 Swarthmore College
0% 5 1435 Bowdoin College
6% 11 1435 Brown University
25% 14 1435 Carnegie Mellon University
0% 2 1430 Carleton College
13% 5 1430 University of Notre Dame
17% 6 1420 Cornell University
18% 6 1415 Johns Hopkins University
0% 9 1410 Claremont McKenna College
0% 7 1410 Wellesley College
0% 4 1405 Georgetown University
0% 2 1400 Haverford College
0% 4 1390 Vassar College
0% 6 1390 Wesleyan University
54% 20 1389 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
0% 3 1385 Hamilton College
4% 4 1385 Washington and Lee University
17% 14 1380 University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
10% 13 1380 University of Southern California
30% 15 1375 Case Western Reserve University
0% 5 1375 Grinnell College
0% 7 1375 Middlebury College
0% 12 1375 Reed College
1% 4 1367 Scripps College
0% 4 1365 Colgate University
0% 7 1365 College of William and Mary
0% 7 1365 Emory University
0% 13 1363 Oberlin College
0% 2 1360 Boston College
58% 41 1360 Georgia Institute of Technology-Main Campus
55% 14 1355 Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
0% 7 1355 New York University
12% 19 1355 University of California-Berkeley
18% 16 1355 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
13% 7 1355 University of Virginia-Main Campus
0% 4 1350 Brandeis University
11% 8 1350 University of Rochester
0% 4 1345 Colby College
0% 8 1340 Barnard College
0% 3 1340 Bryn Mawr College
0% 2 1340 Macalester College
0% 2 1335 Davidson College
0% 8 1325 Colorado College
7% 11 1325 University of Miami
1% 8 1322 Whitman College
0% 3 1320 Kenyon College
4% 14 1320 Tulane University of Louisiana
30% 13 1315 Lehigh University
1% 13 1315 Wheaton College
10% 6 1310 Union College
12% 18 1310 University of Maryland-College Park
0% 3 1310 University of Richmond
0% 5 1305 Occidental College
9% 12 1305 Southern Methodist University
41% 2 1305 United States Air Force Academy
0% 9 1305 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
13% 4 1305 Villanova University
10% 12 1303 SUNY at Binghamton
17% 4 1300 Bucknell University
0% 4 1300 St Olaf College
65% 34 1300 Stevens Institute of Technology
8% 21 1300 University of California-Los Angeles
11% 21 1300 University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
88% 29 1295 Colorado School of Mines
4% 5 1295 George Washington University
59% 24 1295 Polytechnic Institute of New York University
13% 7 1290 Santa Clara University
7% 4 1285 Boston University
0% 4 1285 Gettysburg College
0% 9 1285 New College of Florida
0% 12 1285 SUNY College at Geneseo
23% 4 1283 United States Military Academy
34% 0 1280 United States Naval Academy
13% 30 1280 University of California-San Diego
10% 28 1280 University of Wisconsin-Madison
0% 3 1278 Dickinson College
25% 3 1275 Lafayette College
0% 8 1275 Lewis & Clark College
44% 3 1275 United States Coast Guard Academy
45% 31 1270 Illinois Institute of Technology
The above were in nice, neat columns when I pasted the list but the columns were lost when I posted. ??
I took the percentage of graduating engineering majors from the CDS, section J (not Kiplinger).
Michigan’s CDS files are here:
http://obp.umich.edu/root/facts-figures/common-data-set/
For 2014-15, Michigan reports the number of graduating engineering majors as 16%.
For the number of students graduating within 4 years or less, the same CDS (line B7) reports 4513.
That’s out of an initial cohort of 5955 (line B6). 4513/ 5955 = 76%, the same number as Kiplinger’s.
Now it may be true that 21.1% of Michigan’s entire undergraduate student body is “enrolled in engineering”. Maybe that number is indeed higher than the corresponding number for some other schools with higher 4y graduation rates. If so, that fact might help explain some 4y graduation rate differences. However, to reach that conclusion fairly, we’d need to compare apples to apples. The CDS does not report the number “enrolled in engineering”. It reports the percentage of graduating engineering majors.
But however you count these numbers, I’m pretty sure Michigan does not have more engineering students than MIT, Caltech, or Mudd. I doubt Michigan has significantly more than Princeton or JHU … and probably not many more than Tufts or Cornell. All these schools have higher 4y graduation rates than Michigan. There appears to be some other factor, besides the percentage of engineering students, affecting the 4y graduation rates.
“Now it may be true that 21.1% of Michigan’s entire undergraduate student body is “enrolled in engineering”. Maybe that number is indeed higher than the corresponding number for some other schools with higher 4y graduation rates. If so, that fact might help explain some 4y graduation rate differences. However, to reach that conclusion fairly, we’d need to compare apples to apples. The CDS does not report the number “enrolled in engineering”. It reports the percentage of graduating engineering majors.”
That’s why I didn’t post CDS numbers tk.
“But however you count these numbers, I’m pretty sure Michigan does not have more engineering students than MIT, Caltech, or Mudd. I doubt Michigan has significantly more than Princeton or JHU … and probably not many more than Tufts or Cornell.”
I’m pretty sure Michigan has quite a bit more engineering students enrolled in Ann Arbor than all of those schools mentioned above, including MIT. Maybe I’m misinterpreting your commentary tk?
^ You’re right, Michigan would have a larger absolute number of engineering students than those much smaller schools. So I should have stated, “I’m pretty sure Michigan does not have a higher percentage of engineering students…” (more per capita). It should be clear from the context of this discussion that it is the percentage, not the absolute number, of engineering students that might be relevant to graduation rates.
Well, ok. I’m not sure the number (percentage) of students “enrolled in engineering” would be a better number, for purposes of this discussion, than the number (percentage) of graduating engineering majors. Maybe it would be, but how do we even determine which students are “enrolled in engineering” in a way that can be compared from school to school? And if we’re going to cite this percentage for Michigan, we ought to cite a corresponding percentage (one that has the same meaning) for the colleges we’re comparing.
I don think the colleges are being deceitful but I do think there is not enough discussion or understanding of why there are sigh huge differences between schools in terms of four year rates or what the cost impact of this is. It is not uncommon for a very top private university to have greater than 90 percent of students graduate in four years. For large state flagships the four year rate might be 60 percent or even lower. If you pay out of state rates of $45k/ year and the private college costs $60k/year maybe after typical financial aid award you pay $30k and $40k. Six times $30k is higher than four times $40k.
That is no surprise, since the “very top private universities” are more selective than “large state flagships”. If you start with a cohort of stronger students, you are likely to get higher graduation rates. An additional factor is that “very top private universities” tend to have students from wealthier families (usually about half from the “no financial aid” top 3%), and tend to have good financial aid for those from families who are merely upper-middle income and below, so running out of money or needing to take reduced course loads to work lots of hours tends to be less of a concern.
Whether any of this affects the chances of a given individual student graduating on-time or not is another matter. A strong student without money concerns at a “large state flagship” is unlikely to have a significantly different chance of graduating on-time or late than if s/he went to a “very top private university”.
Expected graduation rates of colleges given student characteristics are discussed at:
http://heri.ucla.edu/DARCU/CompletingCollege2011.pdf
There is a basic graduation rate calculator at the page linked below, with a more detailed one linked at the bottom of the page:
http://www.heri.ucla.edu/GradRateCalculator.php
Students and parents wanting to estimate a given student’s chance of on-time or late graduation may want to put in a hypothetical university composed of 100% of students just like the given student and see what comes up.