Confused Senior needs your Advice

[ucbalumnus]

@eyemgh

NOTE: For those who care, ABET is very important, except when it isn’t. Schools like Caltech and Stanford, with long records of strong engineering can break the rules, because they essentially wrote/write the rules. That should not be seen as saying all non-ABET accredited programs are OK. There’s a big difference between a school that can’t get it and schools that have electively dropped it.

Where a non-ABET accredited engineering bachelor’s degree program can be acceptable to the student:

1. The following apply:

• the student is not going in a direction that requires or benefits from PE licensing (PE licensing is most common in civil engineering, but some in other engineering areas do work on infrastructure used by the general public), and
• the student is not considering the patent exam, and
• the school has a long established reputation in engineering.

2. Or the student’s goals are more engineering-adjacent rather than engineering per se (e.g. finance or consulting in an engineering context).

In category 1, there are situations like Stanford and Caltech. In category 2, there would be the non-ABET-accredited programs at Brown, Dartmouth, WLU, etc. (although Brown and Dartmouth also offer ABET-accredited programs).