The terms polytechnic, institute of technology, and “school of mines” identify the historical roots of schools. These schools were founded starting in the 1800’s to meet the needs of industry and were originally modeled after the technologically focused schools of Germany. The oldest such school in the US was RPI (1824, the second was MIT (1861) and the third was WPI (1865). Because of the evolving needs for a more highly skilled workforce, US manufacturers began demanding more study on the application of science to industry. Many have since grown in scope to become full fledged universities. As they worked on the application of science to industry, they became more and more involved in the development of pure science and math. Carnegie Institute of Technology was founded by a very wealthy US industrialist in 1912 and later merged with Mellon Institute of Industrial Research to become Carnegie Mellon University. Case Western is another example of an early technological school’s merger with a more traditional college.
By comparison, Harvard, Yale and the “Ivy’s” were founded earlier and focused on theology, Greek, Latin and study of the classic western thinkers. Harvard made significant efforts in 1842 and Yale in 1852 to develop engineering schools and did make significant contributions. Education was for the well-to-do and there was little interest in the hands on environment of the rapidly developing engineering fields. Applied science studies had an early, but difficult start at these institutions because of their teaching faculties strong focus on the classical fields. It was hard to appreciate the coming explosion in the application of scientific knowledge. “Hands on” had difficulty gaining full acceptance with the more traditional faculties.
CS and math are highly developed fields of study at many of these schools today. The historically technologically grounded schools tend to offer a broader scope in the engineering fields because of the broad range of engineering laboratories needed to cover ME, CE, EE, ChE and now robotics and biomedical engineering. Cornell University is an “Ivy” with a robust, fully developed engineering school…
:bz