<p>So i was looking for stats of how many yale students major in engineering and a source cited 2.9% (it was bloomberg from like last year) and the total number of students according to wiki is 1892 admitted per year, so it would mean that about 55 students major in engineering. That is really small, what is the deal, Yale has the number 1 impact of engineering research but the department is so small. I tried to find the number of URM's that were in engineering and the best I could find was the website of the Yale chapter of National Society for Black Engineers and there were six ppl featured. That seems ridiculous that there are only 6 black engineering students at Yale, so I was asking that if anyone else has a statistical breakdown could you provide it? I am black and applied under mechanical engineering so I wanted to know. Thanks! </p>
<p>And can we discuss why there are so few engineering students overall?</p>
<p>Yale is not known as a big, engineering school. The engineering program has been recently rebuilt, and their throwing tons of money at the department right now. However, the department is small, and has a 1:1 student:faculty ratio, which is a huge advantage imho.</p>
<p>For Yale, engineering isn't a very popular major because it's perceived that Yale's focus is not in the hard sciences. However, that assumption is no longer true, as the hard sciences and engineering have become Yale's priority (with $1 billion dollars invested to really beef up those programs.). </p>
<p>Go to Yale if you want to major in engineering while receiving one of the strongest liberal arts educations you can receive. If you're a hardcore engineer and want to be focusing on science while surrounded by other hardcore engineers, MIT may be the place to go.</p>
<p>The fact that Yale's engineering is tempered by existence in a LA college is exacting why D is applying to Yale for engineering. Out of the 10 schools she is applying, six offer engineering but she is only applying engineering to two of them - one being Yale and the other ironically MIT. She actually is not sure she likes the idea of MIT's intensity in technology but they have a particular unique major. At Yale, her engineering experience will be most like what she would look for in an engineering degree. The other 4 school are all too much at the technical end (like MIT) but without the redeeming factor of the major that appeals to her.</p>
<p>Yale admits about 1900 students, but only about 1350 enroll. That equates to 40 engineering students/class.</p>
<p>Yale used to have a highly respected engineering school, the Sheffield School, that was a separate college within the university. Sometime in the period just after WWII Sheff was merged into Yale College, and engineering languished at Yale. There were always a handful of students, but in the mid '70s if two of them hadn't lived next door to me, I never would have met any (and living next door to two of them for three years, and being actually good friends with them, I never met any others).</p>
<p>From what I heard/read, Yale is not a popular engineering school. Its programs are not too strong, and people mainly choose Stanford, MIT and Georgetown for engineering.</p>
<p>For the most part, engineering programs exist separately from a standard liberal arts curriculum. Places like MIT, Cal Tech, RPI are fundamentally engineering-only colleges. Other universities tend to have separate undergraduate engineering schools, with different admissions and different requirements than the arts-and-sciences school. Most state universities are like that, as are Cornell, Penn, Columbia, and many others. Places like Princeton, Stanford, and Yale keep engineering within the main undergraduate curriculum, but that can make it somewhat hard on the students. Anyway, Stanford and Princeton always nurtured their engineering programs and kept them strong; it helped that both -- Stanford especially -- always had really strong graduate engineering programs, something I believe Yale lacked. </p>
<p>In any event, Yale sort of missed the boat with engineering. Harvard did much the same thing, at one point effectively ceding engineering to MIT, and then letting it wither on the vine in the 60s-80s, before making a push to revive it in the past decade.</p>