viperm90

Will employers care if a certain engineering program at a university is accredited or not. Will I not be able to find a job if I get a degree like that?

aibarr

What field are you going into?

ABET accreditation is only really important for people who intend to get a professional engineering license (eg, civil engineers, structural engineers, and certain other types of engineers whose drawings are required to be stamped with the seal of a professional engineer). Even so, just so long as either your bachelors degree or your masters degree is from a school with an accredited program, you're okay.

viperm90

I was thinking about doing bioengineering at Binghamton but supposedly its nott accredited

ken285

Binghampton is a good school, so don't worry about accreditation, especially in bioengineering.

Corbett

No state licenses bioengineers or biomedical engineers, and there are no FE or PE exams in these fields. So ABET accreditation is essemtially optional for bioengineering or biomedical engineering programs. If you check the list of accredited programs at abet.org, you will find that many well known engineering schools (not just Binghamton) have never bothered to become ABET-accredited in these disciplines.

A non-ABET degree in bioengineering or biomedical engineering would probably not be a professional liability. The only exception might be if you wanted to make a career change into a more traditional engineering discipline, like mechanical or civil. In this case, a non-ABET degree might not be perceived as a "real" engineering degree by some employers or state licensing boards.

viperm90

If I go for bioengineering, I will also plan on getting a graduate degree in the field. Will getting a non ABET degree have any impact on grad school admissions? or will it not matter?

Corbett

I doubt that any graduate program in bioengineering looks to see if a BS degree in this field is ABET accredited. If they did, then graduates of schools like Cornell, Stanford, Caltech, and MIT would also be penalized, not just graduates of SUNY-Binghamton. None of these schools have ABET accreditation for their bioengineering programs.

The lack of an ABET degree could possibly become an issue if you wanted to switch out of bioengineering, and go to graduate school in a more traditional engineering field. ABET BS degrees are the norm in traditional disciplines like chemical, civil, mechanical, etc.