Which of these are especially known as STEM schools?

College Search & Selection
21

Yale has been known for the life sciences for the longest time. If someone rates it poorly in that space, it shows lack of familiarity of that person. And their opinion should be appropriately weighted. Therefore a lot of these generic polls are not useful.

2 Likes
22

Apparently Purdue can’t be considered a good STEM school. It didn’t even make the list. Better to attend in-state option IU for that Engineering degree


Or MIT. Or Caltech. Or Stanford. Or UIUC. Or CMU.

I don’t see the point.

1 Like
23

As the OP stated, the list consists of the most active forums on CC only.

24

It doesn’t really make a difference what our perceptions are. I guess this is what is being asked of us. When I see Michigan and UTexas low on this list I scratch my head especially when talking about STEM. But it made me learn about this cool STEM initiative that Indiana has https://iustem.sitehost.iu.edu/
And this 2 IU Bloomington programs rank 2nd in Academic Ranking of World Universities: IU News.

And this https://luddy.indiana.edu/

I know Indiana has some sort of agreement with Purdue and think like the state not to have a school of engineering or something like that.

1 Like
26

To throw back the curtain a bit, someone asked me which of our top schools are considered STEM schools. My first thought was to look in our database of schools to see which ones had STEM majors. In reality, all of the most-talked-about schools on CC have excellent programs in the science/tech/math space. My next idea was that if a school had “Tech” in it’s name (Georgia Tech and Cal Polytechnic SLO) that would be a good sign. But how could you exclude Cal? None of the metrics I could think of did the job.

Another way to phrase the question is “If someone asked to be matched to a STEM school, would this school be in the running?” It’s question of perception than anything else. Yale might be a good answer to the question, but it’s going to take a lot more to justify it as a STEM school than Georgia Tech. That doesn’t mean Yale is no good at STEM. Instead it means Yale has not spread the word about it’s STEM programs very effectively (so far).

The results of this poll mostly match my intuition. If we pick an arbitrary cut-off of 50%, that would be (for this sample):

  1. Georgia Tech (93%)
  2. Cal (77%)
  3. Cal Poly SLO (56%)
  4. Cornell (55%)
  5. Michigan (55%)

If you have a metric that never matches up with the eye test, it’s probably wrong. And if it never surprises you, it’s probably useless. But if four out of five times it tells you what you know, and one out of five it surprises you, you might have something.—Bill James

So the results of this poll surprises me on one of the five top results. I guess I just don’t know enough about Cornell to know how it ranks with other schools when it comes to STEM. (For better or worse, most of what I know about Cornell comes from The Office.) After seeing this result, I’m going to pay a bit more attention to Cornell when it comes to STEM.

Perceptions matter because the task of evaluating each school objectively is a monumental task fraught with potential errors. Worse, “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” We see that with acceptance rate. Before schools started aiming for a low acceptance rate, it was a good shorthand for measuring the desirability and selectivity of a school. Now that the measure is well-known, it’s too easy to manipulate. I’m not even talking about malicious manipulation, but even innocent ways admissions offices might put a thumb on the scale.

Reputation of schools is a shortcut too. It helps students narrow the world of schools they are interested in. I was talking to my son, who is transferring as a junior, and he mentioned a certain school he’d considered is “a party school”. I don’t know if that reputation is earned, but it helped him eliminate that school so that he could focus on places that better meet his temperament.

Reputation doesn’t always match reality, of course. A senior I know from church was accepted by many elite school, but selected the University of Alabama in Huntsville. It doesn’t have the reputation of a school for top students, but she did her research and decided it was the right place for her. One of the valuable services CC provides is people saying things like “I know you didn’t mention it, but have you considered [some school that the student hadn’t considered]?”

I think we should refine this poll. It’s odd to leave out obvious candidates and it would probably help to segment STEM a bit.

27

My answer to this question is the question “what kind of STEM?”

It does not make sense to lump all of STEM together for the purpose of choosing a college, since many colleges are strong in some areas but not other areas that fall under the STEM descriptor. The student’s more specific areas of interest matter in what is a suitable college. The super-advanced math major, the nuclear engineering major, and the pre-med biology major are unlikely to find the same set of colleges to be suitable or optimal from an academic perspective.

3 Likes
29

This topic was automatically closed 180 days after the last reply. If you’d like to reply, please flag the thread for moderator attention.