<p>Shizz:</p>
<p>You've got some misinformation in there. Some of the smaller schools produce very successful engineers. The National Science Foundation tracks the undergrad college or university for successful PhDs completions, broken down by field. Over a recent five year period in their ongoing survey, Swarthmore produced a higher rate of Engineering PhDs (15.6 per 1000 undergrads) than Stanford (13.2 per 1000 undergrads). Even more amazing, Swarthmore tied Georgia Tech in the number of future Engineering PhDs per 1000 undergrads.</p>
<p>If you expand the fields to include all science and engineering PhDs (including social science fields), it's not even close. Swarthmore produced 168 per 1000 undergrads versus 74 for Stanford.</p>
<p>I think that, in most cases, a student who is absolutely, positively, beyond a shadow of a doubt sure at age 17 that they want to study science and engineering and nothing but science and engineering would probably be best served by a specialized engineering undergrad program. But, to say that a broadbased education at a liberal arts college "kills your chances" at a career in engineering is just patently false. </p>
<p>I don't think it killed the career of David Baltimore, a chemistry major at Swarthmore who later won the Nobel Prize for his work in microbiology and has been President of Caltech for the last 8 years.</p>
<p>I also would question your assertion that CalTech is "strong in the humanities". It is certainly one of, if not the top, tech schools in the country. However, the breadth and depth of its "Humanities" and "Social Science" departments are fairly limited. I think it's fair to say that you would probably not be hanging out at dinner with a lot of humanities majors at CalTech (or MIT or Harvey Mudd).</p>