Worth going to MIT, Stanford or Harvard for undergrad?

cellardweller
Tue, 15 Feb 2011 13:16:49 +0000

Does engineering lose a lot of concentrators? - yes, but that is true at most/all universities.

Not really. MIT loses very few if any engineers to other fields. In fact, it adds engineering majors between sophomore and senior year, climbing from around 50% of the class to around 60% by graduation. This is in part due to the ease of getting a second major, especially in computer science.

[Students Defect from Sciences | News | The Harvard Crimson](http://www.thecrimson.harvard.edu/article/2008/2/7/students-defect-from-sciences-span-stylefont-weight/)

According to a cross-analysis of data from the admissions department and the Harvard College facebook, there is a wide gap in the number of students who wish to pursue science at the start of their freshman year and the number of students who actually do.

Between one-third and two-thirds of students who declare their intention to study biology or engineering while matriculating have switched their concentrations away from the sciences.

For instance, 364 students in the Class of 2008 intended to concentrate in the biological sciences when they entered Harvard, but only 226 seniors are set to graduate with a degree in one of those fields.

Dropout rates are even more staggering in engineering: only 40 out of the 123 students in the Class of 2008 who said they wanted to study engineering are currently doing so.

But while Harvard has long been known for the strength of its humanities and social science offerings, the stark trend away from science appears to be more than students simply pursuing other interests.

Interviews with students who switched to the social sciences or humanities reveal that the disillusionment is driven by a number of problems in the University’s science curriculum—from large, impersonal introductory courses to the time-intensive nature of the disciplines and the highly competitive peers.



The article does not reference a drop-out rate for natural science concentrators, but it seems unlikely to be very different from that in the biological sciences.