My D is just accepted for mechanical engineering. UCSB vs Cal Poly Pomona, which one is better for mechanical engineering?
Better based on what metric? Earnings potential according to College Scorecard is similar with a slight nod to CPP, but costs and the overall experience will be very different.
what are you looking for in your college experience?
Neither is better for ME. Both are ABET approved programs and so the classes are going to teach similar material. Success will depend on your D working hard for good grades (harder than she may imagine, as in 6-10 hours outside class each week for each STEM class). Finding internships, the burden of which is on the student at almost all schools, is a plus.
However the student experience is quite different since most students live on-campus/near UCSB and CPP is primarily a commuter school. If she hasn’t been to them already I suggest visiting on admitted student day to get a sense of the school and to see how comfortable she feels at each.
Have you visited both? Are both schools affordable?
Academics will be comparable but student life will be a different experience.
Do you have specific questions regarding academics, social life, financial considerations?
My D undecides between UCSB and CPP for mechanical engineering. Cal Poly SLO is definitely another story but she is on waitlist. UCSB has a better reputation but a smaller engineering facility She has been in CPP and will attend UCSB open house early April. Our concerns are:
- Job placement Opportunities (How employees view the 2 colleges)
- Earnings after graduate
- Transferable AP Credits
- Student life and culture
- Financial is not a concern
Any inputs are really appreciated, thanks.
Also, does UCSB academic more rigor and hard to catch up, i.e. more units requirement vs CPP.
1/2: College Scorecard lists CPP at $79,792 and UCSB at $73,907 for initial earnings for ME graduates who received federal financial aid. Probably within typical year-to-year variation. UCSB is more research oriented, which may matter if the student wants to go on to PhD study.
3: https://catalog.cpp.edu/mime/media/53/3477/College+Board+Advanced+Placement+(AP)+Examination+Credit_2020-21.pdf and UC Santa Barbara General Catalog - Advanced Placement Credit and Chart but then you have to check the ME and general education requirements to see which are actually useful.
4: UCSB is more of a residential university, whereas CPP is about half commuter, so UCSB is likely to have more campus-centered student life. It also has a “party” reputation (but residential universities tend to party more than commuter universities) and is right on the beach.
UCSB lists 148 quarter units (out of 180 quarter units to graduate) as required: https://me.ucsb.edu/undergraduate/admissions/bs-requirements . However, the sample program at Academics | Mechanical Engineering - UC Santa Barbara lists 191 quarter units.
CPP lists 127 semester units as required: Program: Mechanical Engineering, B.S.: 127 units - Cal Poly Pomona - Acalog ACMS™
Note that 1 semester unit = 1.5 quarter unit, so the typical 120 semester units to graduate = 180 quarter units. (But ME majors commonly require more than that.)
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Thanks for all information.
I agree with @ucbalumnus. Only student life and culture will be appreciably different, and in a pretty big way. She’ll know what fits her better once she visits. SLO really combines the best of both, the learn by doing, with a residential experience, but that’s still a wait and see.
I have the same question as the original poster, but with a specific emphasis. At CPP, the website states the engineering courses are capped at 30 students and taught by a professor NOT a TA. How are the engineering courses at UCSB - are they capped at a maximum number of students? Are they taught by professors or TAs? Do they get much hands-on learning or is it more theoretical? Thanks
For these kind of questions, you can learn a lot by looking at the requirements for the desired major, and then searching the course catalog to see the class sizes and who teaches the class (for UCSB the link is Curriculum Search). It’s time consuming, but I think it’s a really valuable exercise. We learned so much about each school this way.
They use TAs and large lecturers. How large, you’d have to look it up through the school.
Thanks so much for linking the UCSB course catalog; I found it to be very informative! I appreciate you taking the time to answer my question.
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Thanks - I discovered in the Curriculum Course Catalog that the lectures are taught by profs and no one is listed by the labs and discussions. I’m assuming that means that those are led by TAs. I attended UCI a few decades ago and that is exactly what it was like!
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At UCSB there is usually going to be one offering each quarter for the required ME classes so the enrollment will be the size of the ME class, generally 75 or so according to degrees awarded [ Degrees Conferred | Office of Budget & Planning and look just at ME degrees] For ME electives the class size will be smaller since not all students are interested in the same electives. At a UC the lecture will be by a prof, labs and discussion section run by a TA. For lower division prep classes (physics, calculus, etc) those are going to be larger than the ME classes.
At a CSU classes are going to be smaller right from the start. The tradeoff, though, is that CSU hires lots of part-time adjuncts. Since the number of MEs per class year isn’t huge most ME classes will be taught by fulltime faculty, but those small prep classes (physics, calculus, etc) are often going to be taught by lecturers. See for example Mathematics & Statistics and look at the faculty listings.
Both are ABET programs and will do a fine job of teaching ME. There are some differences in class size but IMO the most important factors affecting student outcome are how hard the student works to master challenging subjects and whether they get internships.
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