Getting an undergrad degree in engineering is hard. The course material is complex, competition is fierce, the time commitment is great, and the grades are generally on the low side of the bell-shaped curve. Put it all together, and it can make for a pretty grueling four-year experience. So when The Princeton Review came out with its annual edition of "The Best 377 Colleges," I wasn't surprised to again find that engineering schools did poorly in the area of student happiness.
We've written about this before. Year after year, The Princeton Review publishes its "unhappiest students" list, and every year it is disproportionately clogged with engineering schools. This year, six of the worst eight on that list were schools whose student bodies have a high percentage of engineers. On the happiness side, none of the top 20 were engineering schools.
The "least happy students" list in The Princeton Review's "Best 377 Colleges" book is again clogged with schools that have a high percentage of engineering students. (Source: The Princeton Review)
The question is: Why?
The answer: Getting an engineering degree can be painful.
"Engineering, math, and science are some of the more challenging fields, and perhaps students are translating that into unhappiness," William Kline, dean of innovation and engagement at Rose-Hulman Institute, said in an interview. "But I don't think there's anything about the field of engineering that makes students inherently unhappy."
The results might be different if The Princeton Review ran a survey asking the same questions a few months after the students graduated. I suspect the happiness ratio might rise at that point, especially among the engineering students who received multiple, high-paying job offers.
It's also worth noting that engineering schools aren't showing up on some of The Princeton Review's other notable lists. The book's well-known "party schools" list, for example, has nary an engineering entrant. Engineering schools are also absent in categories titled "lots of beer," "lots of hard liquor," and "reefer madness." Although I'm sure many engineering students drink their share of beer and liquor in college, they apparently aren't achieving quite as much in that area as their non-engineering counterparts.
Of course, that doesn't mean we should give a pass to those schools that keep landing on the unhappiness list every year. Engineering educators admit that some schools are too focused on research, and not focused enough on teaching. They say too many schools use language-challenged grad students as instructors. And they say theoretical course material is too seldom complemented by design experience.
"You have to focus on hands-on experience, so as the students learn the material in class, they have opportunities to put it into practice," Kline told us. He points out that schools that focus on teaching, rather than research, never seem to end up on unhappiness lists.
Even with that emphasis on teaching, however, we're never likely to see a day when engineering schools are described as fun and easy. Engineering curriculums will always be hard; the question is whether students are mentally and emotionally prepared for that kind of academic rigor. "It's challenging," Kline said. "It's a lot of work. But the world always needs engineers, mathematicians and scientists."
The Princeton Review's "Least Happy Students" List
I noticed that one of the criticisms was that the schools concentrated too much on research. I initially studied physics at a large state school, and that was the criticism then (early 1970s). My son is at the Illinois Institute of Technology and they are on the list. Therer was a long and heated discussion on the IIT LinkedIn group about that. Now IIT has about twice the number of graduate students as undergraduates in many departments. It is definately a research school. That might be one of the issues, although I got the impression from my son's friends that they liked being there. It is hard to tell.
I have to agree that it's just a tough road to hoe. My youngest son is an Engineering student and it's definitely hard for him because of the scheduling commitment. His friends have chosen, shall we say, lesser disciplines and have much more free time than he can afford.
Interesting that the 10 top-rated schools (US News & World report rankings)--MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Georgia Tech, Caltech, U of Illinois Urbana Champaign, Carnegie Mellon, U of Michigan Ann Arbor, U of Texas Austin, Cornell--aren't on either list.
I agree, tekochip. I believe one of the reasons for the unhappiness is that other students seem to have more time to go out on the town, while the engineering students are hitting the books. It makes them wonder why they're doing it. The answer to that question doesn't get revealed to them until they start interviewing for jobs.
Actually, Ann, several of the schools that you mentioned -- Stanford, California-Berkeley, Illinois, Michigan, Texas, Cornell -- wouldn't have been counted as engineering schools, anyway. For the purposes of this list, I counted it as an engineering school if 50% or more of enrolled students are in engineering. In a sense, that makes it all the more amazing that so many e-schools made the list. The group of schools that have 50% engineering enrollment is very small.
Through my numerous major changes and several transfers I noticed that all the schools had something in common, they treated engineering curriculum as honor student courses and graded much, much tougher than any of the other classes. I think they failed to realize that there are honor student dorms with students taking honor classes. I had even been told we grade the way we do to protect the engineering professions from a flooding of people. I think it's the only curriculum that allows 25 steps of correct math operations to result in an F because the number at the end is incorrect. hmm.. I thought the professional certification at the end was to keep those not so good engineers from making big mistakes much like the BAR and CPA exams. Gotta love the way the fella in the article brushes off student unhappiness.
The Princeton crowd wouldn't know a tech school if it bit them in the butt. I'm an EE from U of Michigan which is a university, thanks, with a fine College of Engineering. We nerds partied as much as the lazy dopers in the next-door Liberal Arts college, and nobody fretted about "happiness" or sniveled "it's haaaard". Either you're fine with being a grind, or you downshift into Advanced Basket Weaving. "We got jobs!" was the motto of the class of '80.
I went to IIT and we've got to be close to having at least 50% engineering students. Last year when we made the list, however, we found Princeton Review had not used current surveys to rank us. I'm going to have to look that up again. However, we were just ranked as the 24th most rigorous curriculum in the U.S.
Lou, I went to IIT and so did my father. I was also the one that started the LinkedIn discussion. What came out of the LinkedIn discussion were two people that didn't like IIT and a whole lot of people, including myself, that started in the workplace much more prepared than any of their peers from just about any major. We do have one of the toughest curriculums in the country and the immediate location is not Malibu. And yet most people were able to find a good time in the few hours they had left from studying. We also made our way into downtown Chicago often. Here's a story that says a lot. When I was there in the 80's one of the students was carjacked. The thief had a gun and drove him into an alley a few miles from campus. When the thief ordered the kid out of the car he asked the robber if he could have his books as this was finals week. The robber pointed the gun at him and said, "what do you think this is?" but gave him the books anyway. I will leave this discussion at that. On a positive note that LinkedIn discussion opened the way for me to get more involved with IIT's Alumni Association and we are doing some good things!
I have a slightly different take on this. The four-year undergrad grind for an engineering degree is hard! Mentally, Physically, and Socially. You definitely have to chose your priority.
What made me unhappiest about the undergrad exerience was that I never really got to apply what I was learning until the summer or winter breaks, and by then I was too tired, hungry, and starved for human interaction. Always, it was race through the chapters and problem sets and regurgitate it on an exam a few weeks later. If you struggled with something, there was no time to catch up.
I did fine - I had a rich experience as a kid, building things and taking them apart... turning all the resistor bands brown, making parts squirt smoke... a foundation too many of my peers lacked. My youthful experience provided me the gifts of intuition and insight that helped immeasurably when I slammed head-first into the theory and math. This is why I know STEM activities are important to future engineers and scientists.
I don't have any answers - I think undergrads need time to tinker and explore (use!) the tools they're developing. But there is no time for this in the four year program, and seemingly little time in our kids lives for the kind of "tech play" I enjoyed in my youth. I had the most fun in grad school, where alongside a solid grad course load, I was designing, building, testing, and fielding sensors - to me, this felt like what an education should be.
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