<p>What you describe of the NU and Brown approaches sounds very integrated. Is it a fair assumption that the curricula at many of the well-respected engineering programs (e.g., Michigan, Illinois) are more fragmented in their approach, or are they trending toward integration of principles and design, too?</p>
<p>^modestmelody, actually the change happened in 1997 but the curriculum keeps evolving and getting fine-tuned. the students’ feedback has been very positive in all aspects, other than the added workload (group assignments and design projects tend to be more time-consuming).</p>
<p>So they’ve “moved”.</p>
<p>zapfino,
Many programs still stay the same as before. Some added couple courses here and there. But a change of that scale wouldn’t happen without full support from the administration and faculty. Since such change doesn’t affect any external rankings, it’s not necessarily a priority for many schools. Also any change like that involves certain amount of risk; given that engineering curriculum in most schools is pretty loaded, there’s no room to just add stuff and see if it works. A change at that scale would involve elimination of some of the old. The logistics can be quite complicated and it takes bold leadership to implement it.</p>
<p>It also involves fighting with ABET, which has perpetually given Brown a hard time and pushed back on changes the faculty here has wanted to make.</p>
<p>^I think the quarter systems perhaps helps a little bit in this aspect. Engineering students take 48 courses there. I think that’s on the high side yet 4 courses per quarter is still a manageable load. So the calendar system gives a bit more room and flexibility to implement the changes while still keeping ABET happy.</p>
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<p>I said it before and I’ll say it again: the term ‘deserve’ is a tough animal, for one could argue that nobody ever really ‘deserves’ anything. More to the point, the word ‘deserve’ can be twisted to mean anything you want it to mean.</p>
<p>As a case in point, some people might try to argue that Berkeley actually ‘deserves’ to be ranked higher than Stanford when it comes to undergrad education. After all, Berkeley offers a wider range of majors - including undergraduate business - than Stanford does. Berkeley is located in a far more interesting town. {Let’s face it, Palo Alto is boring, something that even my brother - who went to Stanford - will freely concede.} Berkeley’s student body is clearly more economically diverse (although not as geographically diverse). I know many Berkeley people who would like to believe that that rationale should imply that Berkeley deserves to be ranked higher than Stanford. </p>
<p>But of course, the fatal weakness of that logic is that Stanford beats Berkeley in the cross-admit battle in a complete rout, and that victory would be even more crushing if Stanford and Berkeley cost the same. That strongly implies that most Berkeley undergrads would rather be going to Stanford, but either didn’t get in, couldn’t afford it, or didn’t even apply because they knew they wouldn’t get in (or couldn’t afford it), but very few Stanford undergrads would rather be going to Berkeley. {Note, graduate school is a different story for which many people do happily turn down Stanford for Berkeley, especially for PhD programs.} </p>
<p>Hence, if Stanford ever wants to dethrone Harvard as King of the Hill, then Stanford will need to convince the majority of cross-admits to choose Stanford over Harvard, perhaps via superior engineering programs as the enticement. However, as I’ve said, that would only happen when people actually want to be engineers - that is, not just majoring in engineering, but actually working as engineers - as opposed to completing engineering degrees and then just taking jobs as consultants or bankers or moving on to law or medical school. Put another way, as long as an engineering degree is viewed as merely a waypoint to some other, more desirable career, nobody is really going to care about the engineering rankings.</p>
<p>I don’t know when this topic moved to engineering, but…</p>
<p>Cornell, Columbia, and Princeton are top, top engineering schools.</p>
<p>Harvard, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, and Penn are all top 50 engineering schools, or maybe even top 40.</p>
<p>That’s pretty good, considering there are probably thousands of schools where you can major in engineering.</p>
<p>As far as Dartmouth, if you know you want to get the ABET accredited B.E. degree, you can pretty easily get it in four years.
I’m not as sure about Brown or anyone else’s ABET troubles.</p>
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<p>I don’t agree with this. We need more of the top “thinkers” in engineering. I’m not an engineer (yet), but I’d imagine engineers use their brains and communication skills a lot more than many people who graduate with liberal arts degrees, wherever they end up working. And as far as “no private school will be all things to all people,” can you go check the motto of Cornell University for me?</p>
<p>Of course, a lot of people majoring in engineering at Ivies go into finance, I’ve heard. But I’m sure a lot of them don’t, especially coming from Columbia and Cornell where there are very established engineering schools. If the others expand that, a similar thing could happen. What’s wrong with making engineering more important? In fact, engineering is probably less of a trade degree than lots of liberal arts kind of degrees, because the engineering degree leaves more kings of job options open.</p>
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<p>MIT and Stanford are the 2 best engineering schools in the country, and yet many of their engineering graduates don’t take engineering jobs, preferring jobs in consulting or finance (or heading for law or medical school). </p>
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<p>I don’t think anybody is saying that there’s anything wrong with that. </p>
<p>All we’re saying is that Harvard and Yale obviously don’t need to improve their engineering programs, at least not yet, as the top students still prefer H and Y regardless. Maybe in the future that will change, but it certainly hasn’t changed so far.</p>
<p>Many bright people who attend good engineering schools actually become engineers, or pursue closely related areas such as technical research or related academia. People with that intent prominently in mind from the outset probably are likely to choose to apply to a good engineering school.</p>
<p>Of course along the way many find opportunities that come up that they think they’ll like better. Going to a great school makes such diversion more likely, because more opportunities present themselves. This is equally true for students of engineering and students of philosophy, or what have you, who wind up in investment banking instead of whatever else they would have otherwise done. Top payers poach some of the top talent, whatever the field, from whatever else they might have done. Some are attracted, some aren’t.</p>
<p>On the other hand, my guess is more people who matriculate to schools with relatively weak engineering programs probably don’t really want to be engineers in the first place. I would imagine the proportion of such people who don’t wind up in engineering- related fields from such schools is higher than at the schools with the strong programs.</p>
<p>Both will bleed students to the poachers. Just as many of the employers of liberal arts grads will lose to these same poachers. </p>
<p>Yet there will be liberal arts majors who choose the other, non-banking employers. And students from the schools with good engineering programs who choose engineering practice or related further studies.</p>
<p>I would imagine students who highly value a strong engineering program will not so frequently show up as a cross-admit statistic vs. schools that have a substantially weaker engineering program, because they are less likely to apply to a school that is weak in their primary area of interest. Probably many of the top students who really want engineeing as a priority prefer MIT or Cal Tech, do not apply to Harvard and Yale. They are probably losing such students, but many don’t show up in cross admit because they don’t apply to Harvard and Yale. Is my guess.</p>
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<p>Yet that also presumes that people actually know what they want to do, and let’s face it, most high school seniors don’t really know what they want. Heck, I know people in their 40’s who still don’t really know what they want to do. </p>
<p>This is a particular problem in the case of engineering. Few high schools actually teach engineering in any serious way. Hence, most high school students don’t really know what engineering is like. They don’t have the ability to make an informed decision. </p>
<p>So, what happens if you turn down Harvard for the higher-ranked engineering programs at Berkeley or Michigan…only to find out later that you don’t really like engineering, and/or that you’re just not good at it? You probably wish that you could invoke a mulligan. Unfortunately, no time machines are available, so what’s done is done.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, Ds HS friend applied ED to MIT in preference to applying to Harvard or Yale, because these schools did not offer strong programs in the areas that interested him. These other schools lost his personal “cross-admit battle” pre-emptively, because of their perceived poorer programs in these areas.</p>
<p>Many students do not know what they want, some students do know though, yet others are willing to take that risk because they have to in order to access superior breadth and depth of opportunities in the areas they feel they are interested in. </p>
<p>The point pertinent to this thread is, there are undoubtedly other students like D1s friend. All top students do NOT prefer H and Y regardless, as you claimed n post #189, Some don’t apply because of their relatively weak programs in these areas. And then they don’t show up in your cross-admit stats, because they didn’t even like H or Y well enough to apply.</p>
<p>They don’t <em>need</em> to improve their engineering programs, as you say, but that doesn’t mean there is no impact, as you suggested, or that the subset of brilliant individuals who are, actually, quite focused on engineering are more often than not heading to Yale in preference to MIT.</p>
<p>Lots of such people will prefer, and attend MIT, and lots of them will actually wind up in engineering or related fields, in some capacity. Which IMO might have been a less likely outcome of they’d gone to a place that was relatively bad, and had few offerings, in the field they actually wanted to study.</p>
<p>The point of the other posters on this thread is, H & Y should not be satisfied being 2nd fiddle to MIT for the subset of top students that are like my daughter’s HS friend.</p>
<p>As to those that say engineering isn’t a popular major amongst Ivy bound students, think again. According to the National Merit Corporation engineering was the most popular major of choice National Merit Scholars at 18%. It was also the most popular major of choice for National Achievement scholars at 14%. Yes, even for URMs who are traditionally underrepresented in engineering programs. And you can look at the colleges of choices a lot of students are going to, H and Y taking their fair share of students. There is clearly strong interest to at least major in engineering amongst top students, an interest that H and Y don’t meet as much as some schools perceived as less elite.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nationalmerit.org/annual_report.pdf[/url]”>http://www.nationalmerit.org/annual_report.pdf</a></p>
<p>pages:33 and 35</p>
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<p>That’s a very interesting story indeed when you consider the fact that MIT doesn’t even offer an early decision process. It offers a nonbinding early action prcess.</p>
<p>[MIT</a> Admissions: Early Action Versus Regular Action](<a href=“http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/apply/early_action_versus_regular_action/index.shtml]MIT”>http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/apply/early_action_versus_regular_action/index.shtml)</p>
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<p>Come on, I was speaking informally and probabilistically. It is obviously not true that each and every top student in the entire world will prefer H & Y, just like when I say that children like candy, that doesn’t mean that each and every single child in the entire world likes candy. It just means that the probabilities hold true.</p>
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Again, the obvious question comes up: what do those students want to do with engineering?</p>
<p>Look at Penn. Last year’s career survey of graduating engineering students showed that less than half of employed students went into an engineering-related field. In fact, only 27% went into a directly related field. 55% went into consulting or finance.</p>
<p>Take Hopkins as another example. A recent survey of its students showed that 52% went to graduate school, 20% went to medical school, and 11% went into ibanking.</p>
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<p>Sure, as tentative college majors. What ultimately matters is your final major. </p>
<p>I personally have strong memories of boatloads of people thinking that they wanted to major in engineering, and then either finding out that they hated it, or being unceremoniously weeded out of the major, or both. Probably no more than 1/3 of the students who started out in the first (weeder) engineering course with me actually ended up finishing the engineering major. Nor was my experience particularly unique: engineering is notorious throughout the nation for high weedout/dropout rates.</p>
<p>“It offers a nonbinding early action prcess”</p>
<p>The point is he applied there, and nowhere else, and he went there. Whether his early acceptance was actually binding or not is an irrelevancy to my point, But forgive me for not understanding this nuance of their particular process , as my kids did not apply there.</p>
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<p>These are National Merit Scholars, not any set of ordinary high school seniors who just decided to major in engineering because they liked woodshop or got an A- in high school physics. Look at how many got summa, phi beta kappa, etc. Besides how many people are getting weeded out at Stanford and MIT? Do you think H and Y will make their engineering programs weed out if they upped their programs? I doubt it. Sure some people change but it’s because they didn’t like it. But that’s not particular to engineering. The same can be said of every major. Besides, do people go into engineering say “So since there’s a decent chance I’ll drop out, I might as well not care about the strength of my engineering program”? Doubt it.</p>
<p>IBClass, that is very true that many engineers at top schools do not pursue traditional engineering jobs straight afterwards. However, how many of these prospective engineers knew they were going to work in consulting and finance? Many pursued engineering since it was good to keep their options open, and besides not all of them will stay in consulting and finance for long-especially in this economy. Furthermore, those going to grad school relied on the strength of their engineering program to get the research and strong recs these grad schools so desired.</p>
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<p>Actually, plenty of people at Stanford and (especially) MIT are weeded out of engineering, and it is precisely because they are top students that they choose to do so. Granted, this is more of a case of “self”-weeding, but whatever you want to call it, students who did well in high school seem to be unusually sensitive to getting subpar grades, and engineering at any school is known for relatively harsh grading standards. This is an entirely additive reason to the normal rationales for people changing majors. Anybody can change majors because they don’t like it, but additionally, engineering students change majors because they’re getting terrible grades. In contrast, it is nearly impossible to get terrible grades in certain other majors. </p>
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<p>No, they’ll just choose to turn down that premier engineering school completely in favor of Harvard or Yale. The pdf you showed actually serves to support my point, not yours, in that Harvard garners more and Yale garners nearly as many National Merit Scholars as both Stanford and MIT combined. </p>
<p>So I think the pdf actually weakens your case, which is why I wonder why you presented it at all, for it simply begs the question, if engineering is so important to the National Merit Scholars, then why do so many of them choose to go to Harvard or Yale? </p>
<p>{Note, I can understand perhaps why so many would go to Arizona State, considering the extra merit suppport that ASU provides to most National Merit Scholars. But none of HYSM provide any extra merit support to those scholars. }</p>
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<p>I can’t speak for MIT, but at Stanford if you were serious about becoming an engineer in the first place you’ll be able to finish. Now of course, I can’t speak with the authority of a senior, but having finished freshman year taking engineering/math/science classes most of my peers and I didn’t think it was much more difficult grading wise than the humanities. The only problem was, these courses took a lot more time. But again, if you enjoy it, it won’t be a problem. Indeed, my grades in the required humanities classes were lower than my techy grades because I didn’t like humanities but I did like techy stuff. </p>
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<p>Good point. I have an answer to that, but I’m thinking about how to phrase it.</p>