Which Engineering Schools support students more than weed them out?

We live in Texas. Daughter has been accepted to TAMU engineering, and we’re about to apply to Purdue and possibly UMichigan. Daughter is National Merit Semifinalist, never made a B on a report card, etc. I’m really getting concerned about what I hear and read about engineering being notorious for weeding out students. I would like a university with a good engineering program in which they accept the students they want and then support them with tutoring, etc. instead of having a survival-of-the-fittest culture, maybe a bit more nurturing and mentoring. Is there such a thing? Desperate for advice!

There is a spectrum. In general, private schools tend to have more resources to devote toward student support. From people I’ve interviewed and spoken to, Purdue and Michigan don’t seem as harsh as say Georgia Tech.

There are some schools that sacrifice rigor to make them less brutal. In other words, they cover everything, but more superficially. This might not be a bad thing for certain students who work better when they can keep their self confidence. WPI, Tufts and Rochester all have less rigor. It’s a tradeoff. Lehigh seems to retain the rigor, but makes it less brutal by not requiring quite so much. That seems like a decent tradeoff.

Harvey Mudd is a really supportive environment but makes their students work incredibly hard. It’s more of “we’re all in this together” than “survival of the fittest”.

There are a lot of options and yours is a great question to ask during visits.

By the way, MIT, as brutal as it is, is very supportive. I was able to get lots of tutoring when I was there a long time ago. I believe that culture still exists. So there is a difference between lack of support and less rigor. I think the whole spectrum exists so it’s worth asking.

Thanks for your advice! Does anyone know where TAMU would fit on the spectrum with Purdue and Michigan? Also, are there any highly regarded private school engineering programs a bit closer to home?

If by “never made a B”, you mean that she is a straight A student (as opposed to a straight C student), then she has a high probability of graduating with an engineering degree at any school that is a decent fit and has her major.

It can be difficult to separate out the treatment effect of a supportive academic environment while maintaining high standards with the much larger selection effect on graduation rates. Basically, highly selective schools will have high graduation rates because students with high academic credentials on entrance are more likely to succeed (e.g. MIT, Harvey Mudd). Other schools have lesser admission standards (less selective publics often exist to give everyone another chance), but the weaker students who do not turn around their study habits get “weeded out” (though stronger students at such schools will likely succeed). In some cases, selective but not super-selective schools are capacity-constrained in the engineering majors, so “weeding” occurs by requiring a high enough frosh GPA to declare some of the engineering majors (e.g. Purdue, Minnesota).

Agree with the Harvey Mudd comment above. Incredibly challenging, but very collaborative. I always get an image of them helping each other over a very difficult obstacle course. My kid adores it, would not trade it for anyplace else.

What about Rice? Private, smaller, excellent engineering school. Or Trinity. I don’t know a lot about TAMU, although my daughter has been auto admitted to the engineering school there and we still have to visit. I think the big state schools “weed” out because so many kids apply thinking engineering but have no idea what that really means and rigorous compared to their all “A” high school experience and they are surrounded by the top 5 % of every high school class in TX. I think that the key is to find/form a good study group and take advantage of office hours as much as possible. And I have heard it helps to “skip” some of the weed out classes with AP if possible. Good luck to your daughter.

UCB makes a good point about schools where it’s competitive getting into a major. I think those would be pressure cookers.

The idea that schools intentionally weed out students is completely overblown. It really isn’t all that common. Consider that the rankings (like them or not) generally take graduation rate into account, and those are about the most effective form of advertising for a department. Basically, departments bend over backward to try to get their rankings up because it attracts students (and higher quality students) and brings in a lot of money. With that in mind, in this day and age, basically all departments have the goal of retaining more students.

The “weeding out” effect generally has a lot more to do with students struggling to adjust to college than it does with a school trying to weed kids out. It usually takes one of two forms, in my experience: a student is woefully underprepared academically for the rigors of an engineering curriculum or the student is woefully underprepared for living (mostly) independently and therefore either parties too much or fails to develop good study habits. Interestingly enough, most of the people I know who fell into the latter category were actually very highly qualified and never really had to work hard in high school, and so came in without study habits of any sort and struggled mightily when the difficulty was ratcheted up. Public schools have a higher attrition rate in large part because they have to, by state mandate, admit a lot more of the first type of student than do private schools.

I have first-hand experience at both Illinois and Texas A&M, and I can say that both of them did not seem interested in weeding out students. The students themselves seemed to mostly be of a very high quality, and most of them were not overly competitive or anything and were much more likely to work together to get through problem sets as a team than to try to let someone struggle so that they can get ahead.

This is one advantage of universities that do require you to declare a major field of study from the outset instead of admitting to a “pre-engineering” track. Of course the advantage of the “pre-engineering” tactic is that it lets students get some exposure to different fields before selecting one since most don’t have any real experience before college. It’s sort of a trade-off.

@Commiserating , curious as to what other criteria you and your D have been considering for her choice of an Engg. education. “Collaborative environment”, “weed out colleges/courses” and “pressure cookers” are commonly used terms for any selective and rigorous Engg. school.

@ClassicRockerDad when you mentioned Rochester did you mean RIT or U of R?

@smokinact I meant University of Rochester. RIT is a lower tier school.

@bonehead. I can believe that at Illinois. I’m less familiar with A&M. As you said, Illinois is harder to get in so they probably do the weeding at admissions. Georgia Tech on the other hand or schools that are competitive for admission and retention in the major, rely on students dropping out. Hence the weed out.

When I was at MIT, I took the first CS course where this famous professor came in on the first day and said that roughly 1/3 of the sophomore class had chosen EECS as their major (I was a freshman). He said that they couldn’t really allow that, that they wouldn’t MAKE anybody leave, but that we should expect this class to be really hard, and that some of you WILL change majors. Basically, he was saying that the difficulty of this class was going to increase until enough sophomores dropped EECS. All he had to do was increase the workload and difficulty until his objective was met. How bad do you want it! Later in the year, someone in my tutorial section of 5 people committed suicide. I have no idea if this was a factor, I didn’t know the person, but imagine being 18 and experiencing this.

There really is a range of how difficult life is for engineers at different schools. This is a great thing to investigate.

Thanks @ClassicRockerDad - how does one determine that Rochester is less rigorous than say RPI?

MIT sounds downright sadistic.

Regarding criteria, that’s an interesting question. She started out saying no Ivy League because she’s a low-stress kind of gal, and she has the perception that they would be too high stress for her tastes. After visiting UMichigan though she says it’s a good school and she wants to apply, even though her 35 ACT and 2350 SAT would be right in line with the people we saw there (so she wouldn’t have the academic edge on anyone.) She hasn’t firmly decided on engineering, and so she’s getting stumped by the UMichigan prompt of how would their curriculum support her interests because she hasn’t seen anything that absolutely grabs her. She’s a smart girl who hasn’t found a “passion” (I hate that word.) So end result: we’re looking for an engineering program with a really good reputation that is as low-stress as possible, that actively supports their students instead of ignoring them or weeding them out (survival of the fittest for at least the first couple of years.) She knows it’s hard, so she’s not expecting stress-free-- just as low stress as possible for her. BTW, if anyone has suggestions on the UMichigan prompt, we’re all ears.

@ClassicRockerDad , you keep on mentioning GTech as a more of a “weed out” Engg. school than say Purdue or UMich. Where are you coming up with these stats? My D2 is a Sophomore there and I have closely followed GTech for the last few years whether this is anywhere near the truth. The main reason that folks drop out of GTech is coz they lose their GA Hope/ Zell Miller scholarships (less than 3.2 GPA which is hard to maintain) and thus, move to easier academic climes in order to be re-establish these scholarships.

And what makes you think that the admission criteria at GTech is less than those of the other public elites? Let me educate you.

GTech Freshman Profile
http://admission.gatech.edu/images/pdf/2015_freshman_profile_web.pdf

NMS
http://factbook.gatech.edu/admissions-and-enrollment/national-merit-achievement-scholars/

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-105-smartest-public-colleges-in-america-2015-9

ClassicRockerDad, thank you for your story-- that is the scenario we’re trying to avoid. Daughter is intelligent enough to succeed, but I have no desire to find her breaking point.

My D was also a top student. Never below an A on a report card since 7th grade. Great test scores. She has also been a straight A student in her engineering program so far. It hasn’t been easy and she’s had at least one near-B. I think the keys are realistic expectations: expecting to have to work harder, being able to assess your own strengths and weaknesses accurately, and a willingness to seek out the help that is available. All these schools have tutoring available, office hours, the possibility of collaborating with other students, etc. The student needs to be willing to take full advantage of what’s out there, seek to actually understand the material, not be intimidated by a struggle to understand, and also be able to regroup when the results are less than an A.

It is probably also worth noting that with the exception of Princeton and Cornell, the Ivy League is generally lagging behind its public and tech school brethren in engineering. They just don’t focus so much on it there.

I’d caution you (or her) against this line of thinking. Standardized testing scores are really only weakly correlated with success in college. It’s about the best thing there we have to use as an “unbiased” indicator, but really it’s not that indicative in my experience. I knew plenty of people who scored 34 or above who struggled, and I know plenty of people who scored 28 to 30 or so and did really well. All I am saying is don’t go in with the idea that test scores are already going to put you ahead of the pack. It may make it all that much more disheartening when the inevitable C on an exam comes around.

There are several ways this can be done for new frosh looking at engineering:

A. Admit undeclared (or “engineering undeclared”), declaration of desired major is a formality assuming student is on track with prerequisite sequencing. Usually only the case at the wealthiest schools that have extra capacity in all majors, or low selectivity schools where the interest in or ability to handle engineering is low compared to the department capacity. These schools also tend to be highly selective.

B. Admit undeclared (or “pre-engineering”), declaration of desired major requires a higher GPA (than the “good standing” GPA which is usually 2.0) or a competitive admission process. This can be stressful on the frosh student, as well as encouraging a more cutthroat attitude.

C. Admit directly to a major. However, changing major may require a higher GPA or a competitive admission process.

Obviously, A above is the least stressful in terms of getting into the major, but the course work can still be highly rigorous (and an A student in high school may get his/her first B or C grades in college). C is less stressful for a student who does not want to change majors, but can be an issue if the student does want to change majors. In both B and C, the stress level depends on how high the GPA requirement or how competitive the admission process is to enter or change to the desired major (it may depend on how popular each major is compared to the department’s capacity).

Some colleges have more than one of the above. For example, University of Washington admits some frosh into engineering majors (C), but many engineering hopefuls get admitted as undeclared and must apply to the major later (B). Berkeley does mostly C, but one of the options is to apply to “engineering undeclared” which allows choosing a major later (A), though that option is usually more selective for frosh admission than the specific engineering majors.

@Commiserating -

I have a D at UMich (second year, Biomed Engr) and another at Rose-Hulman (BS ChemE 2015, staying for MS). Rose is small, rigorous/challenging, but very supportive and collaborative - quite similar to Harvey Mudd (they’ve tied last two years at No. 1 in USNWR for engineering schools that do not offer a PhD). UMich is much larger, still rigorous/challenging, and does offer support, but you have to seek it out a little more than at Rose. E.g. at Rose, there are residential tutors in the sophomore dorms as that year seems to be particularly challenging. At UMich, however, my D has had no problem meeting with her advisor or profs, uses the TAs, and has found study friends in most classes.

If you search my posts you’ll find loads more info on these schools, but I’m also happy to try to answer any specific Qs that you have. Though the schools are different, my D’s are both really happy at their respective places and neither could imagine going to the other’s.

As to the Michigan prompt, your D might look at these items on their web: use of engr core curriculum (allows you to explore a few classes and then you declare specific engr major around 3rd term), undergraduate research programs (great experience, and another way to learn more about different disciplines), flexibility (diversity/breadth available gives many more options for minors, etc. than a tech school like Rose).

One thing to consider if your D hasn’t found her passion, if she changes her mind about majoring in engr at a school like Rose or Mudd, her options are more limited if she doesn’t want to switch universities.

FYI, we live in TX too, but just moved here this year. Used to live in Midwest.