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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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