My point was that Michigan has a higher percentage of its undergraduates enrolled in Engineering than most of the non tech schools mentioned in post # 611. The graduation rates of individual schools don’t change this fact, especially considering what was mentioned in post # 613.
Schools that don’t count CS in “engineering” stats. These colleges have CS departments outside of engineering.
Georgia Institute of Technology
University of California, Irvine
The University of Texas at Austin
University of Maryland, College Park
Rutgers University
University of Wisconsin-Madison
University of California, Davis
New Jersey Institute of Technology
Purdue University
University of Massachusetts Amherst
University of Michigan
FAMU-FSU College of Engineering
Northeastern University
University of Arizona
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
University of Pittsburgh
Brigham Young University
University of Houston
University of Virginia
Michigan, like Berkeley has CS inside and outside of engineering, with their EECS departments and CS in their arts and science college. I actually thought a few of the schools on the above list also did, but maybe not.
Many schools offer CS degrees both within and outside of their Engineering schools/departments. Princeton falls into this category (see https://engineering.princeton.edu/undergraduate-studies/concentrations), as for example does UVA (https://engineering.virginia.edu/ba-vs-bs-computer-science). The list above is inaccurate.
If people want to quibble with CDS numbers, ok, but then we better recalculate them for every college in the list. Meanwhile, I suggest we go by what the schools themselves report in each CDS. There may indeed be variations in how those numbers are compiled; that is one justification for considering multiple factors in comparing colleges.
Some posters seem to be focused on Michigan vs. Princeton, but there are other colleges that have even higher percentages of engineering majors than Princeton, yet also have higher graduation rates than Michigan. I don’t think we can discount the possibility that, as @Gator88NE stated, “There is an advantage to attending an elite (well funded) private program.” The graduation rates presumably are influenced (to some degree) by the quality of student support services, whether required classes are over-subscribed, or other factors that can’t be dismissed as selection effects.
At any rate, you can’t count on USNWR and other services to rank colleges with perfect precision and accuracy (or perfect fidelity to whatever each of us means by the “best” colleges.)
4y Grad Rate … % Engineering Majors … College
89% … 26.6% … Princeton
88% … 16.2%? … Columbia*
88% … 21.4%? … JHU*
86% … 38.5% … Harvey Mudd
85% … 36% … MIT
85% … 16.9% … Cornell
83% … 19% … Rice
79% … 36% … Caltech
79% … 14% … Union College
77% … 17.1% … Michigan
77% … 10% … University of Southern California
75% … 20% … Stanford“
Stanford and Michigan have nearly the same four year graduation rates. Stanford as a whole AND its Engineering school are both elite. Very elite. Stanford is also a very wealthy private university.
“I had overlooked the fact that USN uses 6y rates.
I used the 4 year rate because that is what USNWR (and also Kiplinger) displays“
Using the four year graduation rate definitely benefits the majority of those elite schools that do not offer engineering or have a small percentage of their undergraduates enrolled in that concentration. Of course there are exceptions, but remember that “tech” schools typically enroll “tech” students who know from the onset what course of study they intend on embarking. For example, I would imagine few students transfer into Engineering at MIT from another school within the university.
Using graduation rates (especially 6-year rates) as one of main college ranking benchmarks makes no sense to me. If a college makes its curriculum easier and thus improves its graduation rate, should it climb up the ranking as a result?
Also penalizes schools with more working students.
MIT appears to allow free choice of major, and its general education requirements mean that sophomores are unlikely to be too far behind if they switch to engineering if they initially entered as business or humanities majors.
But it is likely that MIT has a lot of entering students who want engineering and graduate in engineering.
“Some posters seem to be focused on Michigan vs. Princeton,”
I brought that up because engineering is defined separately at these two universities, so comparisons are misleading. Princeton counts computers science, certificates, in its engineering programs. As fooson noted, they have six engr majors, UM has I think 15, and they’re engineering meaning you have to take calculus, math, chemistry, and go from there. I would guess Princeton’s defacto engineering (non-comp sci) to be around 10%.
“The graduation rates presumably are influenced (to some degree) by the quality of student support services, whether required classes are over-subscribed, or other factors that can’t be dismissed as selection effects.”
It could be that public universities have weed out classes because the initial class size is large. A 75% graduation in stem, esp engineering and pre-med is not necessarily a bad thing. I mentioned before that my dr who went to Berkeley undergrad said out of 1800 students in freshman chemistry, only 600 made it to senior year as pre-med. Similarly you want to weed out students that don’t do well in say structural mechanics from becoming civil engineers. That all being said, Princeton is actually pretty good about grade inflation and is rigorous.
Michigan is an exception to the common trend in midwestern and some other flagships. Those who enter in Michigan’s engineering division can declare their engineering majors with a 2.0 GPA and C grades in the prerequisite courses. This is in contrast to other schools like Purdue, Ohio State, Penn State, Minnesota, Virginia Tech, Wisconsin, and Texas A&M, where students may need to meet GPAs significantly higher than 2.0 or apply into competitive admission processes to get into or stay in their majors (presumably because they admit more pre-engineering frosh than they have capacity for at the upper levels).
Note that Berkeley Chemistry 1A is required for many engineering majors, most of which do not have many pre-med students, as well as biology majors which have large numbers of pre-med students (though not all biology majors are pre-meds). Pre-med is inherently a weed-out process, since only those with very high college GPAs (overall and in biology/chemistry/physics/math courses) have enough of a chance of getting into medical school to make it worth the bother applying (of course, there are also other necessary things like high MCAT, volunteering, shadowing, etc.). At Berkeley about a quarter of the students in typical pre-med courses earn A- or higher grades (some variation by course).
But note that the biology majors themselves are not competitive to get into (2.0 GPA / C grades needed), and engineering majors do not have high GPA / grade requirements to continue (but getting into them if enrolled as a non-engineering major is difficult).
This is likely to be correct. 741 applied in the latest cycle. (https://www.aamc.org/download/321456/data/factstablea2-6.pdf)
I would also exclude “Operations Research & Financial Engineering”. Wow! 24% of Princeton “Engineering” students are majoring in this thing. Well, political science is also “science”. (https://registrar.princeton.edu/university_enrollment_sta/degconf.pdf)
Yeah so the reason I specifically brought up Princeton is that the one PU grad I know majored in operations research and most if not all the UM grads I know in silicon valley majored in engineering or computer science. The PU grad basically said it’s not really engineering (his words), so when someone brought up engineering percentages at Princeton, I had to chime in. This is not to denigrate operations research, it’s pretty analytical but if you’re going to get an engineering degree from any school in the US (if I may generalize), you’ll be required to take a lot more math, science, intro engineering classes than O/R.
Non-engineering operations research majors may be heavy with (applied) math and/or (applied) statistics; this appears to be the case for Princeton’s ORFE major. So even though it may not be engineering, it is not math(/statistics)-light.
Of course, at Princeton, ORFE looks like something that those wanting to be Wall Street quants would major in (Princeton is a big Wall Street feeder/target).
After reading so many posts about engineering, I’m even less convinced it clearly, consistently accounts for the different graduation rates among “top” schools. I’m not sure it even matters.
For convenience, I’ll continue to cite 4 year rates, which are shown in column 5 of the following table.
https://www.kiplinger.com/tool/college/T014-S001-kiplinger-s-best-values-in-private-colleges/index.php?table=prv_univ&state_code=ALL&id=none&sortby=foury_gradrate_p&sortorder=DESC
(You can click to sort each column)
Colleges with the highest rates include:
Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Princeton
(schools that seem to have reputations for being rather challenging)
Colleges with the lowest rates include:
Centenary College of Louisiana, Le Toureau U, Liberty University, and BYU-Provo
I’m fairly confident that if the graduation rate is our only filter, and these are the only schools being filtered, this one metric does a fairly good job of separating the sheep from the goats – at least with respect to academic quality (if not “value added” for social mobility or some other outcome).
Is it good enough to distinguish the good sheep from the slightly better sheep? No. That isn’t what the USNWR ranking is good for. I think it can be helpful to, say, a first gen student who has heard of “Harvard” and wants to identify ~20 other colleges with similar features (like: selective admissions, relatively small classes, well-paid faculty, high graduation rates, and strong “peer” reputations.) Even for that purpose, here and there among ranked schools, we’re likely to get false negatives or false positives. And if those aren’t the kinds of features that matter to you, it may not be useful at all.
Low 4-year graduation rate at BYU probably has a lot to do with students taking gap years between starting and finishing college for religious missionary activities.
The other three are significantly less (academically) selective than BYU (or Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, JHU, MIT, and Princeton). Note that they are all religious schools, so there may be other religion-related factors.
@ucbalumnus
Yes, there may be other religion-related factors.
But, those may be among the factors (or kind of factors) that many people would want a good college ranking to reflect. Personally, I’d want to attend a college with a rich intellectual atmosphere, strong academic focus, and a certain esprit de corps. I don’t think I’d prefer to have many entering classmates very busy with employment or religious obligations (or leaving to pursue business start-ups). I’d agree that graduation rates do telegraph selection effects (test scores etc), but they probably also are picking up treatment effects that occur after students arrive. There may not be another USNWR ranking factor that does that much better than the graduation rates (although some other data may be available to do it well, with less noise.)
What USNWR calls “graduation rate performance” is an attempt to separate a college’s treatment effects on graduation rate from its selection effects.
However, it is only weighted at 8%, compared to 17.6% for (six year) graduation rate and 4.4% for first to second year retention rate, which include both the (probably dominant) selection effects as well as treatment effects.
4 year grad rate completely distort colleges that have planned 5 year curriculums like Northeastern and Drexel that have coop built into their programs. As mentioned there are service centered religious colleges that also have planned 4.5 and 5 year graduation rates.
Thats why the 6 year metric makes more sense.