I was kind of surprised by this thread. I was a Tulane Engineering student in early 80s, and never thought
anyone would want to transfer OUT of Tulane engineering for academic reasons. I did transfer out,
but that was for other reasons, I changed to CS in a liberal arts program, in a city I preferred over NOLA.
But I do not recall if they had ME or not, I was CE back then until I changed to CS. Do they no longer have
CE/EE etc at Tulane ? What happened ?
they have Chem Engr, Biomed Engr, CS, and Engineering Physics. if you want ME, EE, or Civ Engr you have to do the 3+2.
well, i couldn’t do it. but if you put it like that to him, he’ll just want to do it even more, just to prove that he can. he likes to be challenged.
@blevine My understanding is that after Katrina, the school lost alot of funding and students so the resources were just dedicated elsewhere. fallenchamist might know more however
@Wien2NC - you may have already said, but did you guys tour Vandy yet?
Do you think it will be manageable for him to blend into the Vandy scene as a late-comer? When we toured I was underwhelmed with the engineering building, though the totality of Vanderbilt is impressive, obviously. Something about the Vandy vibe did not seem right for our son. Couldn’t completely put my finger on it though. Perhaps it was just a negative first impression for us.
On the other hand maybe with the 3+2 plan (preferably 2+2 with his incoming credits) he skips all the early freshman adjustment phase and enters Vandy at the sweet spot (more mature students).
Nashville is a great city that he’d probably enjoy.
^^^
nope haven’t toured yet. he just got back from a summer at Ole Miss and he’s putting together his college list. we will visit where we can. so far it’s been NC State, Duke, Rutgers and Princeton, and Ole Miss of course.
A tour will help. Be forewarned; it’s the definition of bucolic college campus. 
And there is a price tag to match. I was relieved that we didn’t feel it was the perfect place for our son (not that he would have gotten in necessarily).
we’ll be need-based aid and the NPC spit back a very favorable number, so it’s on our radar. we might go to Univ Virginia in a week or 2; they have suddenly jumped way upon on his list. i think he had a very positive summer experience at Ole Miss because he has gone from favoring Michigan and Northwestern to Rice, Virginia, NC State, Vanderbilt, and “I want to go to school in the South.”
smart kiddo @Wien2NC! 
ha, i agree!
I don’t think Tulane and Vandy campuses are all that different. Both are lovely, “movie-like” classic campuses. Tulane’s campus, of course, is actually used in movies a lot, the latest being the just released “Bad Moms”. But I think by the time a student is at that stage of study, they will make friends within their new major fairly readily, and expand out from there. Admittedly, two years is a relatively short time but, again, I am sure they get very busy very fast and end up studying with, eating with, and socializing with people within that major and then meet others. My main point, though, is I think the schools, and the kind of person that attends, are similar enough to make the transition less difficult than other transfers might be. In a way, it isn’t terribly different than going to a new school for a masters.
Yes, Tulane dropped Civil, Electrical and Mechanical Engineering after Katrina. There was tremendous concern at the time about the finances, those programs were expensive to run and, compared to Chemical and Biomedical, the interest was low. They also discontinued Computer Science at that time, but more because they realized their program had fallen woefully out of date and needed a reboot. That has since happened, with a very exciting new CS program coming back to Tulane a few years ago. So in lieu of those discontinued engineering majors, Vandy and JHU stepped up to the plate and partnered with Tulane for the 3+2.
thanks for your really helpful and informative “inside scoop” posts. i have gone from knowing virtually nothing about Tulane to becoming very intrigued by it.
4 is misleading. As long as the student achieves the 3.5 GPA, the transfer to the other school is guaranteed per the agreement with those schools. And #1 is wrong, you don't have to complete the physics major at Tulane, you finish the coursework at the partner institution which then counts towards the Tulane degree. Yes, nearly all the work on the Tulane degree has to be done at Tulane, but that is not hard to do in 3 years for most students.
Hit the ground running at Vanderbilt? Why are you just looking for things to make it sound harder than it is? If a person goes to another school for a masters, they have to hit the ground running there too. That is hardly unusual, and the same for #'s 6 and 7. Those are just the components of the program. That is like saying that to complete any degree anywhere, you have to complete all requirements. It is like you were desperately searching for ways to make the list look long and intimidating, when in fact most of those things are either spelled out and guaranteed (#4) or are quite ordinary. The only one I think is really an issue is that a 3.5 is not a trivial GPA, especially in a major such as Engineering Physics. But I find the list to be silly, personally.
The fact of the matter is that only a couple of students have chosen this path, although they did navigate it successfully. As far as I know, no student that wanted to do it was not able to. I never said it would be a widely used option, but it is a perfectly good one, and calling it risky is just bizarre. If a student majors in Engineering Physics and doesn’t do this program, they are perfectly well prepared for masters degrees in those same fields. In fact, that is no doubt why this program isn’t used as much as they might have originally thought. Dozens, maybe a hundred or so Engineering Physics students since Katrina have instead gone on to graduate degrees in those 3 areas as well as Materials Science. It is simply an option for students that prefer such a path.
point #4 is misleading, and also seems to imply that if you don’t get accepted to Vandy out of HS, it means you just won’t be able to cut it there, and that simply isn’t the case. tons of excellent students are turned away from Vandy and other top schools. there just aren’t enough seats. my son likes Vanderbilt but knows that an acceptance rate of 10-11% is far from a sure thing for anyone. when i mentioned the Tulane-Vandy option his reaction was, “whoa, that sounds awesome!”
i don’t know. some people will look at the exact same situation and see an impossible challenge, while others see an opportunity for a great adventure.
Let’s be even clearer what this entails per Tulane:
(coursework)
The student is responsible for completion of all Tulane University and School of Science and Engineering requirements at Tulane, including the Cultural Knowledge requirement, the writing requirement, and the two-part public service requirement. The one exception is the Tulane capstone requirement, which is fulfilled at the partner institution, through a senior design experience in the 5th year of study. The student will need to work closely with Prof. Wayne Reed (the physics undergraduate advisor), the advisor from the partner institution, and Tulane’s advising office, to make sure that his or her three-year program satisfies both Tulane’s requirements and the requirements of the partner school.
(Grades)
The competitive Dual Degree Engineering Program involves three years of study at Tulane University (with a GPA of 3.5 or higher and very strong grades in math, science, and engineering coursework)
- So the hurdle is actually higher than just a 3.5 GPA per Tulane
It’s great that you know of a few students who made the switch. What about the high school seniors who intended this path when they enrolled at Tulane and then switched majors? Didn’t achieve the required GPA? Decided they liked Tulane and didn’t want to leave? Switched to Vanderbilt and then didn’t get an engineering degree? Or switched back to Tulane? If you successfully complete the Tulane 3 but need to stop after year 4 (at Vanderbilt) you don’t earn a college degree?
It doesn’t seem “bizarre” to me to recognize that is a risky path out of Hugh School to achieve a degree for a major that Tulane stopped offering. Or “silly” to lay out what it entails, perhaps many families have done the same and self-selected another university or another path.
OP, before your son (amazing kid, by the way) commits to any program, take a look at Haverford/Penn 4+1. He’ll end up with a BS from Haverford and an MS from Penn after 5 years…maybe even 4 years with his credits.
My kid doesn’t have the stats but this is the only program that he would consider.
i don’t know what to tell you. by the time he graduates HS next year he will have an Associates in Engineering and about 95 college credits, many of which can be used to fulfill those program requirements. this stuff is all over my head but he loves it and it’s like child’s play to him.
i know the 3+2 sounds risky and hard but if he decides this is what he wants to do, i know he can do it and he will probably complain how bored he is because it’s so easy. he’s a freak – well, not THAT kind of freak but the good kind. i sometimes wonder if the hospital gave us the wrong kid by mistake.
thank you for that idea. i will check it out.
@Wien2NC that’s awesome. So he is applying as a Transfer student? Cast a wide net a find his best fit. Enjoy the journey!
yeah, a wide net that hopefully doesn’t have giant holes in it to let the fish escape !
Nope, sorry @ClarinetDad16 but your reasoning still makes no sense to me at all.
Nope. It DOES NOT say that the GPA for those courses has to be higher, and it doesn’t mean that. Just like for med school and the core course requirements to even apply, or grad school for any major, they look at the courses related to that application and want to see that, for example, you don’t have a 3.7 overall GPA but only a 3.1 in the courses directly related to their interest in you. So of course one has to do reasonably well in those courses, which generally means either no C’s, or if you have one it is offset by many A’s. This is no different and no riskier (poor choice of words IMO but we will stay with it since you chose it) than someone at any school that is then applying for med school or graduate school.
I say risky is a poor choice, IMO, because in this case the requirements and the pathway are clearly laid out. So if you want to call any college major at any school in the country risky, by all means. But like med school or law school or the top grad schools, calling having to get a 3.5 GPA a “risk” is an odd use of the term. Challenging fits better, I think.
Obviously I added the A-E to make referencing easier. But this is bizarre to the extreme, and I can only conclude that you are once again straining to find fault with Tulane, as you have in the past. A-C: How is that any different than any other school and program? If they switch majors, who cares about the 3+2 program. What if they came in wanting to go to med school and decide to become a social worker instead? For point A you present such a non sequitur it is really difficult to respond. If they switch they switch. For B, if they don’t have the GPA they simply don’t, just like if they don’t get into med school or Stanford grad school because they didn’t have the required GPA. For C, your point is impossible to comprehend. If they decide staying at Tulane one more year is more important that getting that CE, ME or EE degree at Vandy, then that is what they choose. They can, as I said, always choose grad school for those degrees. No one can stay at Tulane forever, nice as I thought that would be.
You do realize that you don’t apply to be in the 3+2 program when you apply to Tulane, right? This is something you can decide as late as junior year, as long as you have taken the courses to be an Engineering Physics major anyway. In fact, I don’t think you apply at all in the usual sense. If you decide that is what you want to do, no matter when you decide it, you either meet the criteria or you don’t. As I said, per agreement with Vandy and JHU, they have said they will, without question, take students that meet those requirements.
As for D), it depends on why they didn’t get the degree. If they had a family crisis or some such thing and had to quit school, that would have happened anyway, even if they had stayed at Tulane, or originally attended another school. If you are implying they somehow fail at Vandy or JHU, that seems like an extremely negligible concern. If a student had a 3.5 while majoring in something as challenging as Engineering Physics, the last thing I would be concerned about is that they couldn’t cut it at Vanderbilt. Additional evidence for this is that when Tulane students had to take fall 2005 classes at schools all over the country (because Tulane was closed due to Katrina), including Chicago, Ivy schools, Duke, etc. there was near universal feedback that the Tulane students were indistinguishable from the other students, academically. No, that is really grasping for straws to think that will be an issue. As for E), switched back to Tulane, I have no idea what you are talking about. Again, that is just inventing things to throw up as obstacles.
I think that is all I can say no matter what you come back with. I am sure everyone else can judge the quality of the arguments made.
If the student out of high school wants an engineering degree they can simply choose a school that offers it. Complete the curriculum and graduate in 4 years.
They don’t need to transfer schools to get that degree.
They don’t need to do a 3+2 to get that degree.
They don’t need a 3.5 GPA to get that degree.
They don’t need even higher in specific classes to be eligible to transfer to get that degree.
They don’t need to adapt to a second school to get that degree.
They don’t fail to get a degree if they stop after completing 4 years of school. Or 4.5.
That is reality. Those are “obstacles”. Those are risks students assume if they choose that path at Tulane they wouldn’t have if they picked a single school option. Students have choices and in making their decision they weigh risks.