Princeton Review Survey: Engineering Students Study Harder

Engineers who believe they worked harder than other students in college may now have evidence to support their belief.

In a survey of 122,000 students in the 2011 edition of The Princeton Review's Best 373 Colleges, four of the top five schools in a category titled "students study the most" were engineering colleges. The results were particularly striking because only 27 of the 373 total colleges surveyed could be considered engineering schools.

The four engineering schools at or near the top of the list were Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1^st), Harvey Mudd College (3^rd), California Institute of Technology (4^th) and Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering (5^th). The only non-engineering school in the top five was Reed College of Portland, OR.

According to the book's publisher, the results were no surprise. "Engineering schools tend to finish high on the list of schools that study the most," says Robert Franek, co-author and publisher of Best 373 Colleges. "It's been a constant for many years of doing this book."

Franek says the ranking of the schools stems from one simple question: "How many out-of-class hours do you spend studying each day?" Respondents were instructed to choose a number ranging from "five or more," down to "one or less." The top schools in the survey landed in the "five or more" category, while the bottom ones averaged one or less. None of the 20 schools in a "students study the least" category were engineering colleges.

Franek says that all of the engineering colleges named in the book finished high on the "study" list, largely for a single reason. "For any engineering student, there is a great deal of coursework that has to be fulfilled in a very short time," he says. "That's one of the big reasons they keep appearing high on the list."

Engineering education experts agree with Franek's assessment. "If you take the simple metric of how many credit hours are required for an engineering degree, and how many of the those are in fairly intensive technical classes, and then compare that to a degree in English from a liberal arts college, there's a radical difference," says Mark Somerville, associate dean for academic programs and curricular innovation at Olin College of Engineering.

Somerville, who holds a liberal arts bachelor's degree in addition to an electrical engineering doctorate from MIT, says there's also a cultural difference between those areas of study. "For studying English, I would have enormous amounts of reading to do," he says. "Doing that reading was a very different experience than studying circuit problems. They are qualitatively different experiences - one feels more like work than the other."

Engineering's culture of hard work has met some criticism in recent years. Engineering schools have consistently done poorly in surveys that measure student happiness, in part because students don't always see a clear connection between their intensive coursework and the engineering profession.

Somerville says that at Olin College, students are encouraged to engage in projects of their own choice, and are empowered to make choices for those projects. Such freedom helps students feel that the long hours are well spent, he adds.

"The academic part of what students do in college shouldn't be the thing that they dread," Somerville says. "It should be something they get excited about."