Union College.
It’s on the trimester system. Has engineering. It’s a GREAT little school in upstate NY. Highly respected. Every student I know who has gone there has been over-the-moon happy with it. The college seems to really care about its students. It has very strong alumni support and connections. All the grads seem to get jobs from Union alumni.
Usually, each class is “smaller”. For example, under a semester system, an engineering student may take 4 courses for a total of 16 semester credits of frosh/soph math. Under a quarter system, an engineering student may take 6 courses for a total of 24 quarter credits (= 16 semester credits, since each quarter credit = 2/3 semester credit) of frosh/soph math. However, some schools on the quarter system cram a semester’s worth of material into a quarter, but expect students to take fewer courses per quarter (e.g. instead of 4 courses, the expectation may be only 3 courses per quarter if each course is “larger”). Dartmouth appears to be an example of the latter.
Dartmouth is not that great a choice for engineering, since the ABET-accredited BE degrees usually take more than 12 quarters (4 academic years) to complete. (Of course, this may be less of an issue if the student wants to do the AB degree in engineering as a stepping stone to Wall Street or consulting.)
Check U of Delaware. Solid Engineering (especially Chem). Is on the Semester system but has a long “intersession” - approx 7 - 8 weeks that allows for extra course work, research, internship and study abroad.
Dartmouth College has the quarter system, and the wonderful, flexible D-Plan to go with it! http://dartmouth.edu/education/undergraduate-experience/flexible-study-plan
He would be taking more courses in less time? Sorry, but that needs to be rethought. Quarters are about 10 weeks long each. The time zips by. Overloading on courses is not often a good idea…and especially for engineering majors who have a pretty full and tough course load to begin with.
And he might not be taking “more” classes…they will just be in three parts instead of two. For example…students take a full year of calculus, biology, chemistry, etc…but instead of being two semesters, they are three quarters. So a full year course is still going to take a full academic year to complete.
My kid did well in higher level math courses…but even so…she said squeezing a semester worth if differential equations into 10 weeks was not easy peasy.
DD was an engineering major at Santa Clara which is on quarters. I suggested that school…because it is close to Stanford, but less competitive. SCU has a fine college of engineering, and that SV location.
My son is a junior, in the quarter system. Every quarter he has taken four four-credit classes, 16 credits a quarter.
@ucbalumnus
DS4 went to a combined college presentation. Princeton, Vandy, Northwestern, Cal Berkley, and Dartmouth. He came home with the impression that the quarter system would allow for more electives. I’ll pass along what you said so he can double check that he heard the rep(s) correctly.
@thumper1 We definitely don’t want to see him overloaded, especially as he gets his feet wet the first year.
I’m thinking he’s in for a surprise when he gets to college. Right now, it’s all about not being bored. We think he’s underestimating the workload. He’ll learn.
I’ll pass along all these possibilities, including Santa Clara.
Thanks everyone for the help.
My engineering daughter…on quarters…had very few electives. Her school had a core course requirement…and I guess the choices for those could be viewed as electives. But that was it.
The school did not charge an additional amount for students who wanted to take orchestra and private lessons…and therefore exceeded the number of credits allowed. They didn’t want to discourage students for these types of courses.
But the max was 18 credits which really was a lot for a quarter.
Dartmouth requires 35 courses to graduate, or just under 3 courses per quarter over 12 quarters. Presumably, this means that the normal course load is 3 courses per quarter.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~regarchive/catalog/regulations04/undergrad/degree-req.html
Taking an overload of 4 courses in a quarter is only allowed in up to 4 of the 12 quarters. So the maximum number of courses in 12 quarters is 40.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~reg/guides/csel/csel_student.html#fourthcourse
ABET-accredited BE degrees require at least 9 additional courses (total of 44), which means that more than 12 quarters will be needed to complete the BE degree.
http://engineering.dartmouth.edu/academics/undergraduate/be
My daughter is studying at a quarter system school. What she likes is the pace. It is fast. She says she spent her entire pre-college education waiting for everyone to catch up. This is no longer her experience.
@NorthernMom61 Where does your daughter go to school? My son is happiest when challenged and under lots of pressure. -I don’t totally understand this but, that’s what makes him shine.
Dartmouth is off of his list. He heard a couple of points from the rep that turned him off. (Personal preference type stuff)
UT is a fabulous engineering school. We have family history there and DS1 is a current senior. The only negative for DS4 is that there is very little room in the degree plan to study anything else. Our oldest keeps telling DS4 that he needs to be a Plan II major instead and double major. That way he can pursue whatever classes interest him.
So, maybe DS4 will ultimately decide to change his thinking on his major. For now, he doesn’t want to “waste” his math abilities. I guess we should just be grateful he’s serious about the process at this point.
As others have said, he needs to look carefully at the course requirements for the major he is interested in and how many electives are allowed. It may turn out that the number of electives allowed may not be any greater with a quarter system. If he wants a flexible program, he may want to focus on that as opposed to thinking the quarter system will automatically have that result.
There just isn’t a lot of room in the schedule of an engineering student for electives. I think my daughter gets 2-3 outside of engineering for her entire 4 years. She has a few ‘electives’ within her major, but it not as if she can take a religion course instead of concrete or math. My nephew is in Engineering at a flagship. He is required/allowed to take 15 credits (so 3-5 classes) of courses in the arts and sciences college, as required by ABET (history, languages, econ); at my daughter’s school, which is a tech school, there just aren’t that many options so she’s told to take econ or ancient civ to satisfy those requirements.
I happened to attend the same flagship my nephew attends. One of my friends was in engineering, and she just decided right up front that she was going to take 5 years to graduate because she wanted to take more electives. I remember she took piano, mythology, and a few other classes she was interested in. Of course, that was back in the days when it added about $3000 to her total cost to stay for an extra year, and she could make pretty good money in the summers.
It may be that the quarter system school allows more elective courses, but each one is “smaller”.
That is really the basic difference between the quarter and semester systems – a quarter system divides the academic year into three 10-week quarters, versus two 15-week semesters. If the school is set up so that a student takes four 4-credit courses per term, then the quarter system will have twelve instead of eight courses in an academic year, but each of the courses will only cover 2/3 the amount of material.
But engineers don’t have a lot of electives. If they get to take 5 electives (3 credit semester classes) of art or historyat a semester school, then at a quarter school the student may get to take 6 or 7, but each will be less in depth. It is also possible the student could have fewer electives if the quarter school has the elective as a 4 or 5 credit class, or requires 2 quarters of the same class. Easy to figure out, just look at the sample schedule for the major. You’ll see that every 2nd or 3rd semester, and maybe every 3rd quarter, the schedule has one elective or one restrictive elective (a course within engineering). Count them. I think you’ll find just the few electives required by the ABET.
Unless you schedule extra semesters or a summer, don’t plan on a lot of electives in engineering.
And remember, the admissions officers are trying to sell the school. They may not be engineers and don’t know that all electives are not created equally for engineers. They see ‘elective’ on the schedule and think ‘art history’ and the mechanical engineering adviser thinks ‘fluids’.
I’ll suggest he look up actual degree plans. I don’t know which school it was but, one was described as 24 units. 8 for your major, 8 for the required core, and 8 for electives. That was the statement that DS4 heard that prompted the desire for a quarter system.
It sounds great. Can it be done for engineering? That’s an answer he’s going to need to dig for.
ABET accreditation requires “a general education component that complements the technical content of the curriculum and is consistent with the program and institution objectives”, according to http://www.abet.org/accreditation/accreditation-criteria/criteria-for-accrediting-engineering-programs-2015-2016/#curriculum . Actual H/SS requirements for engineering majors do vary across schools. In some cases (e.g. MIT, CSUs), the requirements are the same as those for all other majors. In other cases, where the school is divided into divisions, the requirements differ for the engineering division. In the case of Brown, there are no general education requirements for non-engineering majors, but engineering majors have an H/SS requirement along with engineering and science requirements for their majors.
The same section indicates that a minimum of 1/4 of the course work needed to graduate must be in math and sciences, and 3/8 must be in engineering science and engineering design. There can be within-major electives within these categories, and the total minimum is 5/8 of the course work needed to graduate, leaving up to 3/8 for general education and free electives. In practice, many engineering major programs require more than 5/8 of the course work needed to graduate, possibly leaving as few as no free electives once the out-of-major course work is used to cover general education requirements. At some schools, the requirements for both the major and general education exceed the usual amount of course work needed to graduate, so that a student needs to take overloads to graduate in 8 semesters or 12 quarters (although, for example, Dartmouth disallows too many overloads, so an ABET-accredited engineering degree takes more than 12 quarters there).
You need to look up the requirements at each school. Just because a school is based on quarters vs. semesters does not mean you will have more electives.
At most quarter schools, the average course load is less per quarter than taken at semester schools. The total number of credits earned over the 4-years is approximately the same. There is variation from one school to the next on total credits taken, regardless of whether they are on a quarter or semester system.
And all schools are not the same in terms of the requirements for the degree and core requirements. My son attends a semester school. While he had 7 courses covered from AP/summer classes, he is getting a Mechanical Engineering and Philosophy dual degree with a Music minor while studying abroad one semester in four years.
But watch to see if those 8 electives can be from any school or department, or if some must be from the engineering school. My daughter has regular electives (history, social studies, maybe even a business class) and 3-4 classes called electives but which are limited to a list of courses in the engineering department. She can choose between oceaneering or meterology but not music for that elective.
Some people like quarters because they move faster and cover less material but in a shorter time. Some schools like Colorado College do just one subject at a time, which is tough if there is a lot of reading for a class. I took a lit class one summer and it was horrible as I was having to read a book a day as every class day would have taken 2-3 days during a regular semester.
I went to a college on the quarter system, and I liked the pace of quarters. The only drawback was that not all classes offer the course maximum credit. For example, there might be 5 credit classes or 3 credit classes. It was definitely harder taking 4 classes a quarter because the 3 credit classes are just as hard as the 5 credit classes.
My son looked at Carleton. If I recall, all of their courses are maximum credit and the standard workload is 3 classes per term.
Our high school has sent a few kids to Colorado College. The feedback about the Block Plan is you either love it or you hate it. There is no in between.