I know rankings are somewhat subjective, but I’ve never seen an undergraduate ranking of engineering programs of all universities, both those that offer doctorates and those like SLO that do not. Any idea where Cal Poly would “rank” if it was put up against the likes of GT, Purdue,
UCLA, or even schools like Washington, Penn State, Wisconsin, Colorado, etc. Would love to hear from those who might have some firm insights.
No one can answer this question for you in any sort of ranking sense way, but what I think you really want to know is “will my student be advantaged or disadvantaged if they choose Cal Poly?” I’ll try to shed some light, and then offer a little advice so that you can get more clarity. In the end, you and your student will have to decide what you value and then listen to your gut.
Let’s start with the fact that rankings, especially USNWR’s Engineering ranking, are specious in the first place. USNWR uses one metric, institutional reputation, as determined by school deans. The research produced in doctoral programs are what determine the reputations of research universities and that has little to nothing to do with the undergrad experience. If they don’t produce a large body of research, what metric will the deans of the non-doctoral schools use to quantify “reputation” of the non-doctoral granting programs?
We paid very little attention to rankings and instead tried to look at how the undergraduate experience at an institution would impact the quality of engineer that would graduate from said institution. We came to that conclusion after my uncle, a Stanford PhD and not one, but two retired Caltech professors, told my son he’d be a better engineer if he avoided their respective institutions for undergrad. They simply felt their schools didn’t do a very good job at educating undergraduates. Yet, there they sit, both with stellar “rankings.”
This may sound dumb, but the first step in being a good engineer is graduating with a degree in engineering. Nationwide, around 60% of students who begin freshman year as engineering majors do not finish in engineering. They either change majors or drop out completely. There’s plenty of evidence that doing some sort of hands on, project based coursework early on greatly increases retention. To that end, we focused on schools that started in major, with more than just bookwork, ideally first year, but worst case, second year.
We then looked at class sizes and who was doing the teaching. At most research institutions, graduate students teach all of the discussions and labs.
Then we looked at facilities. There’s a huge advantage to having lots of good “toys” (lab spaces and support spaces for clubs).
He wanted a “typical college experience,” so schools like MIT, Harvey Mudd and Caltech were off the table immediately.
He didn’t want a program with giant lectures and labs taught by graduate students, and was especially sensitive to paying a bunch of money for OOS tuition at a state school since our flagship was reasonable. That eliminated all the UCs, Michigan, GT, Purdue, Illinois, Cornell, and a few others I’m sure I forgot.
Facilities were a big deal to him, so smaller programs that did have small classes and didn’t use TAs, but had fewer “toys” like Bucknell and Lafayette were eliminated.
He ended up with schools like WPI, RPI, Cal Poly, Case and Lehigh on his list, along with a couple of bigger safeties where he got good money, and ended up choosing Cal Poly.
Cal Poly has small classes, even intro classes like Calculus and Physics have 25-30 students. There’s an occasional larger class, but the biggest hall on the campus only holds 200. I think he had one in there. The instructors, even for labs and discussions have terminal degrees. Few if any of his instructors didn’t hold PhDs. Were they all awesome instructors? Nope. They aren’t anywhere. The facilities are crazy, and all for undergrads. There’s more than 80 labs in the College of Engineering alone, including multiple wind tunnels, even a Mach speed tunnel. There are two facilities that don’t even have classes in them. They are solely there for clubs and non-class projects that students want to do.
He’s now a masters candidate in ME. He’ll finish with BS/MS in 5 years. His experience has been very good. Projects he had to complete for labs were on par with what students were doing for senior projects at other schools (a controler for a wind turbine and an electric camera gimbal as a couple of examples). His senior project and masters thesis are very robust, both used by industry. He was told that he far exceeded expectations at both the internships he did. I’m very confident he’s well prepared to enter the workforce as a very capable, productive engineer.
He has a friend at Poly whose sibling went to Georgia Tech. The GT sibling has been blown away by how much more robust labs and senior project are at Cal Poly versus GT.
That, unfortunately, doesn’t answer your question. It’s a hard question to answer for many reasons. As you clearly stated, schools aren’t all ranked together. VERY few people have direct experience with multiple institutions and those who do through schooling and then faculty appointments, will have been involved with a handful at best. Then, there’s confirmation bias. We tend to have opinions that affirm our already held beliefs.
What I would recommend to you and your student is to start looking at qualities beyond rank that you both find important. In addition to the things I’ve mentioned, that may or may not resonate, look at location, of course cost, because money has opportunity cost, which over a career can add up to millions of dollars, non-academic factors, like hiking, skiing, exposure to city things like restaurants, concerts, museums, etc., even sports teams if that is important. Then you can begin to narrow.
Look at salary data. (I can save you some time. You will find they are all roughly the same.)
Post this question on the Engineering Forum: http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/engineering-majors/
Feel free to PM me if you have specific questions.
Finally, I’ll leave you with an anecdote. I know a gentleman who managed one of NASA’s biggest programs of all time and was a Caltech professor. He said, and I’m paraphrasing, “Let me tell you a secret…it doesn’t matter where your son goes to school. I was able to hire engineers from all over the world. Some of the best ones went to Podunk U and some from my own institution were pretty average. What matters is that he’s curious and driven, and that you don’t pay too much.”
Good luck to your student and enjoy the process.
I agree, in the end, it’s about hiring the curious/driven. I may be a bit biased since I’m a Poly grad ('94 BS CS), but if you were to visit the school, there’s something about the environment there that fosters so much creativity. After visiting all the other engineering departments at several UC campuses last summer, none of them compare. Poly really meets up to their reputation of “learning by doing.” If you were to walk into one of the engineering buildings, you’ll see so many cool projects that kids there do. In addition, I didn’t really see as much “passion” with engineering kids at any of the UC campuses. I think the only other schools that I saw as much passion was at Carnegie and MIT (both also offers small class sizes).
I wholeheartedly agree with the benefit of small class sizes. Because of this, there’s better opportunities for close mentoring by professors. On my interview with my first company (a large video game co. at the time), they had me take a test. I remember competing with grads from UCB, Cal Tech, and few other schools. I was able to beat them all out because I was the only one who knew how to write pseudo code on a recursive algorithm to track sprite movements/frame counts, and the concept/logic behind moving the sprites. I would’ve never learned these techniques if it wasn’t for my AWESOME mentor that helped me with several of my graphics projects.
All in all, I wouldn’t worry too much about the school’s rep. I think HR departments already know that Poly Engineering has a very low selection rate anyways (5% selection rate into CS is no joke) and it seems to be getting even more competitive each year.
These are some great points guys and they make a ton of sense. I will take them to heart. Thank you.
“…the curious/driven”
Love it!
Never underestimate the “curious driven.”
Creativity often requires time and space well balanced with resources and knowledgeable co-workers. Nobel prizes are not a necessity.
Cal Poly admit rate for engineering is 27%.
So, CS is probably north of 20%.
@Greymeer, Cal Poly admits competitively, by major. As a result, the admit stats are all over the map, from some that admit nearly every applicant, to those on par with Stanford’s selectivity. The overall admit rate for engineering is skewed higher by Manufacturing, Materials, and Industrial, all of which accept well over 50% of their applicants. There’s nothing wrong with those programs. It’s simply a popularity contest. CS, ME, AE, and BME garner far more applications. According to Cal Poly’s publically available projection data, for the current class applying, they expect 5297 CS applicants for 100 slots. We have no idea what the yield per major is at Cal Poly, because it isn’t published, but the yield for the whole university hovers around 33%. That means 1 of 3 accepted actually attend. Applying that metric to the estimates for CS nets an anticipated acceptance rate of 5.67%. The actuals, also published for the previous year were just over 8% for CS.
@Greymeer, I disagree. For 2018, CS FTF apps were 5297 with a target of 100. With an estimated 33% yield rate, 300/5297 = 5%. Even if this yield rate is just an estimate, it’s no where close to 20%. The overall admit rate for CENG for 2018 is closer to ~17% ((1123x3)/19141).
https://ir.calpoly.edu/content/publications_reports/targets/index
Actually my math works out to 5.6635831602794% Somewhere we are missing the point!
CalPoly CDS 2017-18
https://content-calpoly-edu.s3.amazonaws.com/ir/1/images/CDS_2017-2018%20%28Annual%20Expense%20Update%20-%20Posted%207.12.18%29.pdf
ACT Comp - 26-31
ACT Math - 26-32
GTech 2017-18
https://irp.gatech.edu/publications/common-data-set/
ACT Comp - 30-34
ACT Math - 30-35
UMich (full school) 2018-19
http://obp.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/pubdata/cds/cds_2018-2019_umaa.pdf
ACT Comp - 30-34
ACT Math - 30-35
At the very least, smarter bunch of kids at GTech and UMich. Since my D2 recently graduated from GTech (MechE), I can state emphatically there is no shortage of learning opportunities and easy access to Professors there. And she had 7 job offers (one of these from NASA) out of her 11 applications, so even that is not something of an issue.
Cal Poly engineering yield was 31%.
160 CS slots per class… so around 520 offers. At 5k applications that is around 10% admit rate.
The CS program is grossly undersized for the college… should be around 300 students. Typically the CS program is 20 to 25% the size of engineering.
@Greymeer, Did you look at the Institutional Research link? They expect nearly 5300 applications for 100 slots per class, not 160. Your estimate of 20% acceptance for CS is demonstrably wrong.
@i012575 said: “At the very least, smarter bunch of kids at GTech and UMich.”
This certainly true across the whole university. The OP is only asking about engineering though. Comparing Cal Poly’s ACTs across the whole university isn’t that useful. Those stats get pulled down pretty hard by the College of Agriculture which makes up a sizeable portion of the student body.
If you compare just the CP College of Engineering, the median SAT for this year’s Cal Poly Freshmen students was 1481 (ACT was 32). GT’s, university wide, was 1425 and Michigan’s, again, university wide, was 1420. So, at least in the College of Engineering, which makes up 25% of the student body, you really can’t say the average student is any lesser than those at either Michigan or Georgia Tech. I cannot find the stats for just Colleges of Engineering at GT or Michigan, and admittedly, they could be higher. They can’t be by much though.
https://admissions.calpoly.edu/prospective/profile.html
Note: If looking at the link above, Cal Poly uses a unique weighting system, allowing up to 8 semesters of AP/IB to boost the grade by one point. Effectively an A in an AP/IB class, would count as an A+. It is impacted by the number of classes a student takes, and counts freshman grades, but for all intents and purposes, the highest GPA is roughly 4.25. That’s why the median GPA is 4.0 or better for every College in the University.
@eyemgh , I work in the Bay Area. I still have to come across anyone who has stated that he/she knows someone that has chosen CalPoly over say the other Cal State schools like UCLA, UCSD,…and that is what OP is interested in finding out too. Maybe your son can point to some of his classmates in this regard.
For engineering Times higher has SLO ranked 133rd in the US a little below Oklahoma State, UAB and a little above Kansas State.
The ASEE student engineering profile is better than Auburn but not quite Alabama engineering.
@eyemgh “They expect nearly 5300 applications for 100 slots per class, not 160”
How do you explain the 700+ enrolled in CS? Does it take 7 years to graduate.
CP eng enrolled ranges 1200 - 1410, 28-33
GT eng enrolled ranges 1400 - 1550, 32-35
Michigan eng enrolled ranges 1300 - 1490, 31-34
@Greymeer, they have typically shot for 130 first time freshmen and 25 transfers from CC. They recently eliminated ED. During that year their yield was far higher than anticipated. They over enrolled that class by about 1000 students. They are cutting back to rebalance, hoping to get back to 21,000. Thats how they ended up with a bit over 700 CS students.
The ASEE data has always seemed odd to me. I’m not sure where they pull it from as it never comports with Cal Poly’s own institutional research data. It is always quite a bit lower. Maybe they include the engineering majors that aren’t in the CENG, like Ag E. I can tell you, because I keep a close eye on threshold admission stats, that if the ASEE data purports to represent just the CENG, it is incorrect, and has been for multiple years.
As for Cal Poly’s Times Higher Education ranking, I’m surprised it isn’t even lower. Sixty percent of the ranking’s methodology is based on research, 30 for budget and 30 for literature citings. Schools that do not have doctoral programs are grossly disadvantaged.
Taking that one step further, as I said in my tome above, I think all rankings are specious. In order for them to have any value their methodology has to be in lockstep with what the user cares about. It rarely if ever is. I just saw a world ranking of engineering that had Harvard at #2. That’s just silly. Harvard isn’t even the best program in the Ivy (Cornell is) and the Ivy is well known as an engineering backwater, with the exception of Cornell.
@i012575, my son did. 
Every year you find students on CC that chose Poly over UCs, including Berkeley and UCLA. They are certainly the exceptions as it takes a lot of introspection to swim against the prestige factor. They do that, I’m presuming, for the same reason my son did…the Cal Poly student experience is quite different than it is at the UCs.
When my son was weighing Stanford for his MS vs. staying at Cal Poly, one of the engineers on the forum said that at one company he worked for they favored Stanford degrees, but at another, their preference was for Cal Poly grads.
Getting back to the OP’s original question, where would it rank. I hope you’re beginning to see why that’s more of a loaded question than you might have thought. 
I live in S. Cal and I’ve been a bunch of seniors make college decisions. SLO is a pretty popular option for science kids as it’s close, SLO is a great town and CP-SLO has a good reputation for sience and engineering. Usually the seniors apply to one or two “top tier” schools - and Georgia Tech / Michigan / MIT / Stanford /Berkeley all rank as top tier - plus a bunch of “good” schools - not top tier but good enough that the kids know they will still be challenged but have a better chance of getting in. SLO is one of those. Most of the other schools mentioned by the OP (Washington, Colorado, Purdue, Penn State) also fall in “good but not super reach” category.
The fact that SLO’s SAT scores are lower than other schools by itself doesn’t make it a poorer program for any one particular student but it definitely means it’s easier to get in. Many kids with stellar scores from High School find university engineering programs to be pretty challenging. Mitch Davis of Purdue wrote an Op Ed last year about wanting students with “grit”; there was much offense taken over this but imo he has a point - once you level-set at a certain ability with math and science the ability to dig in and work hard is a better predictor of success in engineering than having SAT scores in the top 1%.
To answer the OP’s question as objectively as possible - if you merged in the “non-doctorate” and “doctorate” granting engineering programs I think CP-SLO would fall above the top 20 but within the top 40 programs as would Penn State, Washington and Colorado.
I guess the points I’m trying to make are 1) ranked based on what criteria? and 2) should a student de facto choose the highest ranked program if you believe the ranking system valid?
I’ll throw Caltech under the bus as an example. It is well known as a horrible undergraduate experience. It is the highest paced, no holds barred program in the nation, with heavy use of TAs, known for unhappy students and a high suicide rate. Not one, but two retired Caltech/JPL profs told my son not to apply. In the words of one “Caltech is not an undergraduate institution.” Caltech is a very highly ranked undergraduate institution, but does that mean one should apply, or attend if accepted?
All of the “top tier” schools rely heavily on TAs and have large lectures. Berkeley for example has more than 60 TAs in the ME department alone and the largest lecture in the nation. Should one overlook that based on “rank?”
It is important in vetting schools to realize that when it comes to ranking, the emperor really has no clothes. Students need to decide what they value, and vet schools on those criteria.
I think one good point that Greymeer’s posts identify is the fact that there’s an unfortunate truth in the perception of having to rank the entire school and not just programs. We can argue all day long about how Poly’s CENG is super competitive, how kids will get accepted into UCB but not Poly, how Poly rejected over 10K 4.0+ students last year, reputation of their engineering program with the industry, etc. But there is merit to stating that Mich, UVA, Cal, UCLA, etc. will carry their weight better in terms of overall school reputation. But I would caution picking school just for that reason alone though. I’ve met too many kids and relatives picking a school for simply the school name, only to find themselves struggling to find employment without the proper degree (i.e. Economics from UCLA, Bio from Cal, etc.).
I think the only schools that truly carries a “safety net” in terms of employment after college with ANY degree due to reputation are the Ivy leagues and other top tier schools (i.e. a Wharton grad hedge fund manager once told me he only hires Ivy league grads). Any other schools without the right degrees (yes, even Cal) and your kids may struggle a bit after graduation.
Bottom line: If you don’t know your $hit on the day of your interview, it doesn’t matter what school you come out of. Good engineering jobs tend to favor kids that knows their stuff.