However, Bucknell has a very high fraternity/sorority participation rate (majority of undergraduates), and is a small school in a small town in a rural area. So someone who is not into the party/alcohol scene may want to carefully evaluate how readily available other social activities are there. This an example of how non-academic factors can potentially be a significant factor in selecting between various schools’ ABET accredited engineering degree programs.
@ucbalumnus There are plenty of things to do and athletes are not allowed to join frats or sororities and don’t drink much at all. A lot has changed since the 1980’s.
This whole thing is sadly misunderstood. Schools that don’t have frats have different kinds of social organizations that are very similar. Notre Dame has a house system as do others, every NESCAC school has sports houses. They all operate in the same way.
College is socially competitive, students need to understand that no matter where they go, freshman boys especially.
How do you know if a college has a good engineering department? Is accreditation all you need to be considered a good engineering school?
Also, someone mentioned how size at first glance isn’t everything. Would a college with a large total enrollment, but a relatively low number of engineering majors be the same as going to a small college? I understand that most of my first classes will have several hundreds and there is no way around that. However, I feel like it would different at a school like Bucknell.
“How do you know if a college has a good engineering department? Is accreditation all you need to be considered a good engineering school?”
I would also want to know the drop out rate for their engineering program, placement rates, and average salaries for the major you are considering. In my experience, if 80% of the students who start engineering graduate, that is good. Top engineering programs may have placed 80%-90% or more of graduates by graduation. Average salaries can vary more than you might anticipate by school.
Comparison of graduation rates is not so straightforward. Graduation rates tend to be correlated to admission selectivity, so it is much more useful to compare graduation rates with those expected given the admission selectivity. However, data may be harder to come by if you want to look at graduation in an engineering major versus admission selectivity for the engineering major (both of which can differ from that of the school overall).
Most of the small- to mid-sized, top ~50 private universities and LACs were founded before the Civil War.
Historically, these schools have tended to focus on liberal eduction (not technical/pre-professional training).
Many big state universities were founded after the Morrill Act of 1862, which granted land to states for colleges specializing in agriculture and the "mechanic arts” (hence the letters “A&M” in the names of some of these schools.) Their mission was to meet state and national needs for technical leaders during the second industrial revolution. Many of these schools have strong engineering programs, as well as pre-professional programs in fields such as architecture, agriculture, business, communications, and nursing (which many of the older, private “elite” schools still don’t cover at all).
As other posters have indicated, these distinctions aren’t always hard and fast anymore (if they ever were).
In addition to MIT, Caltech, and Harvey Mudd, other private schools with strong engineering programs include Stanford, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Cornell, Northwestern, JHU, Duke, Rice, Vanderbilt, Carnegie Mellon, Olin, Rose-Hulman, Bucknell, and Cooper Union.
It should be noted that historically, in the United States specifically, engineering was considered a middle class profession. In Japan and Europe, engineering has always regarded as a noble academic pursuit, but in the US, the upper crust looked down on it as a vocational profession with very little upward mobility. As such, elite private universities and colleges, most of which catered to the upper class until the second half of the 20th century, saw no benefit to offering engineering degrees.
That being said, as many here have already noted, roughly half of the top 30 Engineering programs in the US are at private universities.
Something else to keep in mind is that all accredited engineering programs, like medical schools, are good. Engineering standards will be high across the board…they have to be. Engineering, like medicine, allows zero margin for error. You cannot design buildings, power plants, nuclear reactors, bridges, aircraft, space shuttles, sea ships, automobiles etc…with any errors or the outcome would be disastrous.
Another thing to consider is industry. For example, those interested in Silicon Valley are just as well served going to college at Santa Clara or SJSU as they are going to a much higher ranked program on the East Coast or Midwest.
The development of steamboats, railroads, the telegraph, mining and metallurgy, textile production, etc., stimulated demand for trained engineers in the half century or more after the American Civil War. The Morrill Land-Grant College Act (1862) was one important response in the USA. However, some private institutions also began addressing the need at about the same time (or even before). UPenn started engineering programs in the 1850s. Cornell’s college of engineering was founded in 1870. Princeton had an engineering program by 1875. Columbia established a school of mines in 1864, which was renamed the “School of Mines, Engineering and Chemistry” in 1896 (however, these programs had roots dating back to the 1700s.) JHU’s engineering programs started in 1913. Stanford’s school of engineering was established in 1926 from earlier departments (including civil engineering, which was one of the university’s original departments in 1891).
It might be considered odd that the University of Chicago, founded by a major industrialist at the height of the second industrial revolution in America, never had an undergraduate engineering major until its recently-created molecular engineering program. Then there are a couple hundred small liberal arts colleges that never added engineering programs or other trappings of a modern, comprehensive university system. It may not be a coincidence that many of them are in small outlying towns. Many schools with strong religious affiliations (including some Catholic schools and schools we now call Christian colleges) also have not developed strong engineering programs.
Actually, engineering often involves anticipating errors and compensating for them, since zero error rate (especially over a lifetime of use) is often impossible or far too expensive. For example, a few decades ago, cars started coming with dual hydraulic systems for their brakes, so that a leak in one system would still allow the car to have some braking ability on the other system instead of losing all braking ability, resulting in a much higher risk of a crash. Cars also have features like seat belts that can help if a crash still occurs (sometimes on the part of the driver which is much less under the engineer’s control, although human factors or ergonomics problems in engineering can affect how frequently human drivers make errors).
Of course, not all types of errors are of the same magnitude in importance. For example, on an airplane, an error that causes engine failure while taking off is much more hazardous than an error that causes a seat to be unable to recline.
ucbalumnus, what I meant is that engineering is a fairly standardized field.