Yale vs Penn

College Search & Selection
24

There are so many lazy generalizations and false assertions in Mastodon’s post that I feel compelled to reply.

  1. Penn has about 2,600 students in each class, Yale has about 1800. Obviously there are going to be more engineering majors at Penn. Whether this will be an advantage (more like-minded peers) or a disadvantage (less individual attention from faculty) is debatable.

  2. Undergrad Engineering at Yale is unique in that it is flexible in terms of course choices for students with different academic priorities. The standard ABET accredited major is chosen by most EE majors, while the Engineering B.A. is chosen mostly by students hoping to double major (anything from Music to CS to History), or those with more diverse academic interests. I highly doubt any of these students “are not motivated enough to handle it”, especially considering Yale students have some of the highest average incoming GPAs and SAT scores (incidentally, about 30-40 points higher than those of Penn students).

  3. From Stanford’s website: http://csmajor.stanford.edu/Considering.shtml
    “Like the CS department, the EE department is no longer ABET accredited. While such accreditation is useful in certain disciplines such as civil engineering, it has no practical significance whatsoever in computer science.” Neither is Harvard’s, CMU’s and a dozen other famed schools for CS. Unlike Mech Eng or Civil Eng, ABET accreditation is pretty unnecessary for EE/CS careers.

  4. From that same Yale website paragraph you quoted: “An academic path qualifies graduates to enter a top-tier graduate program conducting research with broad applications or significant consequences”. I’m highly skeptical that an education that equips grads to tackle cutting edge research questions would be insufficient for industry jobs like you’re suggesting. Either way, a student at both schools should be able to assemble an equally rigorous curriculum.

  5. Yale might have been slightly late to the Engineering game, but it has definitely plowed in its huge resources to make up for it. http://news.yale.edu/2013/06/10/20-ways-yale-was-transformed-during-levin-s-20-years . What Yale was like in the 70s is pretty irrelevant to the discussion now (Fun Fact: Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School was one of the foremost Engineering and Applied Science Schools in the 1800s and early 1900s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheffield_Scientific_School)